Kartography (6 page)

‘Their wedding, I mean.' I held up the photograph, then put it down again. I felt I should say something other than what I had planned to say. He was looking at me as though there was something he wanted me to say. ‘The photograph...' I put it down in front of him. ‘I just wondered, you know, why it's the only one of the four of them together at the wedding.'

He didn't even look at it. He picked up the atlas, cutting off our view of each other, and then swivelled round in the leather chair so that I couldn't see him at all. ‘Bet you don't know how many countries border the Soviet Union.'

‘Bet you think everyone's going to be impressed that you do know,' I said and walked out. Knowledge had never been something we used against each other. The previous year when Ami's cousin visited from France and taught me foreign words, five new ones every day, I always called Karim at the end of the day to share the words with him. You could put Karim's brain in my skull, I believed at the time, and I wouldn't even notice the swap. Why ruin that over the number of countries bordering the Soviet Union? I suspected the real reason for his new interest in maps was the need to feel superior to me. But I couldn't say that. Couldn't say, ‘You just like knowing things that I don't know,' because then he'd look even more superior and say, ‘Who said everything I do has to be about you?' And, I had to admit it, he'd have a point.

I didn't mention the photograph again that day or the next day, or the day after, but I kept it in my room and whenever I found I'd lost Karim to those infernal maps I'd climb up the nomad girl's tree, lean against my father's carving and examine the photograph, searching for clues to the past. That was how Uncle Ali found me, when he came to Rahim Yar Khan to take us home at the end of the winter holidays.

‘What are you doing up there?' he shouted up to me. I stuffed the photograph into the pocket of my jacket, and climbed down.

‘Nothing.' I took him by the hand to lead him away from the tree, but after a few paces he stopped and looked back, up to the branch where I had been sitting, his eyes sliding over to the tree trunk. Surely from this angle and this distance he couldn't see what was written there? He sighed, and then looked at me curiously.

‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?' he said.

‘Do you mind getting sand in your shoes?'

‘Yes.'

We stood and looked at each other for a few seconds, his eyes grave. Uncle Ali always took me seriously, and I loved him for that.

‘I was looking at old pictures,' I said. ‘Karim has your smile. But you don't have it any more.'

He looked taken aback for a moment, then laughed without much humour. ‘You're growing into a perceptive young woman, aren't you?' He put an arm round me. ‘Karim has it mainly when you're around. It's a moonsmile. No light of its own unless there's a sun for it to reflect off.'

‘I'm no sun. The sun is stationary, and I can't stay still for even five minutes. Karim can be the sun. I'll do the orbiting.' I pirouetted around Uncle Ali. He took my hand in his and twirled me as though we were dancing.

‘You're a cool guy, Uncle Ali.'

‘Thank you, sweetheart. If only my son were as easy to convince as you are.'

When I repeated that comment to Karim, as we were preparing to go to the train station later that day, he snorted in disdain. Of late, that had become his standard reaction to anything to do with his father, regardless of the context.

‘Yeah, he's so cool he's frozen,' Karim said. He lifted his suitcase off his bed and carried it to the landing outside, where my suitcase was already waiting for one of Uncle Asif's innumerable servants to carry it to the car.

Uncle Asif, Aunty Laila and Uncle Ali were all in the drawing room on the ground floor, and as we made our way down the stairs we heard their voices through the wide-open door.

‘But really, Ali, you must all come and stay,' Aunty Laila was saying. ‘The kids are divine, but we'd quite like to have divinity's parents' with us, too. Asif, tell him.'

Karim and I stopped, hoping to overhear more about our sterling qualities as house guests.

Uncle Asif grunted. ‘Of course you must all come. And tell Zafar that this time I won't take him for a walk and get him lost in the kinoo orchards if he starts his ranting about the need for land reforms.'

‘God, I had forgotten about that. Asif, really, how could you have?'

Uncle Asif laughed. ‘Laila, it was sixteen years ago, and before your civilizing influence. Besides, Zaf wasn't acting the polite guest himself. Still, I understand why he said those things. I mean, Muhajirs will never understand the way we feel about land. They all left their homes at Partition. No understanding of ties to a place.'

I put out my hand and gripped Karim's shoulder, stopping him as he was starting to walk, whether towards the drawing room or away from it I couldn't tell. When my father spoke of the need for land re-forms to break the power of the feudals, he lost his customary languid posture and his soft voice took on an edge of urgency. Even at thirteen, I could link his fervour to a myriad reasons. The socialist professor who set his mind ablaze when he was at university; the capitalist profession he had entered when he started his own advertising agency; the novels he read (my mother always cringed when he referred to Hugo as ‘Old Vic'); the stories he'd heard, firsthand, from employees and prospective employees who left their villages to come to the city, and were willing to do anything at all to earn a living in Karachi, anything but go back to ‘that life'; his analysis of economic reports; his mistrust of humanity's capacity to be uncorrupted by power. Some reasons were contradictory and some were contradicted by other parts of his life, but all of them,
all,
were part of the mesh that made up his character. Yet Uncle Asif had summarily dismissed all that with one word: muhajir. Immigrant.

I heard a plate—or was it a saucer?—placed firmly on a table, and Uncle Ali said, ‘I share Zafar's views on land reform. And I'm not a Muhajir.'

‘Yes, but you've lived all those years in Karachi,' Uncle Asif said, never losing his jolly tone. ‘It's made you so urban. Don't get uptight, Ali. I love Zafar, you know I do. And when the revolution comes, I'll take refuge in his house and he'll welcome me with open arms and guard me with his life. You, on the other hand, I'm not entirely sure about. Oh, for heaven's sake, yaar, smile.'

‘What is it with people today and my smile?' Uncle Ali asked. ‘Listen, Asif. Let's put aside the old feudal argument. Tell me what's going on in Karachi. What do your contacts in the government say?'

‘That it's all going to hell. More tea?'

‘Asif, this isn't a joke,' Aunty Laila said, her voice exploding as though it had been held captive somewhere for a long time. ‘Karachi's my home, you know. Why did those bloody Muhajirs have to go and form a political group? Once they're united they'll do God knows what. Demanding this, demanding that. Thinking just because they're a majority in Karachi they can trample over everyone else. Like they did in '47. Coming across the border thinking we should be grateful for their presence.' I could see her shadow move across the wall as she paced across the room. ‘Do you hear the way people like Zafar and Yasmin talk about “their Karachi”? My family lived there for generations. Who the hell are these Muhajirs to pretend it's their city!'

‘Laila, Laila,' Uncle Ali said. ‘Do you hear yourself?'

I must have said or done something then, or maybe it was just that I was so motionless that made Karim touch my shoulder. ‘You OK?'

I nodded and pushed past him. ‘Just going to the loo.'

In the downstairs bathroom, I locked the door behind me and climbed out of the window and into the garden. Ducking low beneath window frames, I stole away from the house and sat in the dark on the swing, my hands clenched around the linked chain that moored it to the red metal frame.

What kind of immigrant is born in a city and spends his whole life there, and gets married there, and raises his daughter there? And I, an immigrant's daughter, was an immigrant too. I had spent three weeks living in Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila's house; I'd told her about Zia; I'd sat on his shoulder to untangle a kite from the limb of a tree. If I went back to the house and told them I agreed with my father about land reforms, if I told them Karachi was my home just as much as it was anyone else's, would they look at me and think: another Muhajir. Immigrant. Still immigrants, though our families had crossed the border nearly four decades ago.

But worse than what Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila had said, far worse than that, was Uncle Ali's remark: ‘I'm not a Muhajir.' I had never stopped to think what Uncle Ali was or wasn't. Aunty Maheen was Bengali, I knew, because every so often aunts or cousins would arrive from Bangladesh to visit, bearing gift-wrapped saris and a reminder that Aunty Maheen grew up in another language. After the relatives left, stray words of Bengali would stay clustered around her tongue, falling off in ones and twos, un-understood and untranslated. And there was another reason, also, why I knew and had known for a long time where Aunty Maheen's family was from. I kicked at the ground and the swing jerked forward and back...

Forward and back, Zia marched up and down from the tree to the wall of the school building. I didn't like Zia, even though he and Karim sat together in class and were friends, but I wanted to know why he was moving his arms in that strange way and clenching his little fists—he was so small he could be mistaken for a Prep-E student; not like me, the tallest girl in kindergarten, and should have been the tallest person but wasn't because of that Ghous boy who had failed Class II and so had to repeat the year.

‘It's marching,' he said, when I told Karim to ask him what he was doing. ‘Because there's going to be a war and then I'll become a soldier.'

‘Why will you become a soldier?' I pushed Karim aside.

‘To fight for my country. Then if I die, I'll go to heaven. You can't, because you're a girl.'

‘You're too little to fight. And I don't want to be a soldier, so...so... Karim do you want to be a soldier?'

‘What war?' Karim said.

‘There'll be war with India,' Zia said. ‘There always is. There was one only two years before we were born.'

‘That was because of Bangladesh,' Karim said. ‘That's where my mother's from. She's Bengali. That means I'm half-Bengali.'

Zia pushed. Karim. He fell over without a sound. No one knew it had happened, except the three of us.

‘Donkey!' I yelled and kicked Zia.

‘Tell him not to lie,' Zia yelled back. ‘He's not Bengali, he's not. He's my friend. Why is he lying?' and he raised his foot to kick Karim, raised it back and forward...

Back and forward, higher and higher, the swing hurtled me through the air and I thought, I can do this with no hands, and then I was sprawled in the dirt, the swing thudding to a halt against my shoulder blade.

It had been easy for me to ignore Zia, but Karim's eyes kept filling with tears for the rest of the day and I didn't quite believe it was because of the dirt he'd got in his eyes when Zia kicked him to the ground. Because it had seemed to be a big deal to Karim, I repeated Zia's remark to my parents that afternoon. That's when everything went a little crazy. Zia's parents had come over, and Karim's parents, too, and voices were raised, though I'd been told to stay in my room and so I don't know who said what to whom and why. It was the first time I used the telephone. I called Karim and said, ‘Why are they so angry?' and Karim said he really didn't know, but it just felt to him like Zia had said something really bad. And then Aba and Uncle Ali and Zia's parents all got into cars and went to Zia's house, where they called Zia out of his room and asked him why he'd said what he'd said to Karim. Zia told us the next day that it was so strange, they all looked so strange. When Zia said he thought Bengali was a bad word, his father went straight into his room and fired his ayah. But I don't even remember if she was the one who told me that, Zia said, and his mother yelled at him to be quiet. Talking about it made Karim and Zia friends once more, and when Zia said to me, admiringly, ‘You kick like a boy,' instead of being angry that I'd ratted on him, I decided that maybe he wasn't so bad after all. We never mentioned the incident again. To tell the truth, it had all seemed like a fairly minor event in our lives back when our reactions to anything more earthshattering than the rules of playground games were merely parroted versions of our parents' attitudes, with no real understanding or conviction behind them other than the firm belief that our parents were always right.

But now, years later, I was forced to consider that Karim and I were separate in some way that seemed to matter terribly to people old enough to understand where significance lay. I wrapped my arms around the seat of the swing and rested my head on it. I was Muhajir with a trace of Pathan, and he was Bengali and... Punjabi? Sindhi? what? I considered. Probably Punjabi, I decided. He had relatives in Lahore. These days, with the Civil War treated as a long-distant memory that had nothing to do with our present lives, his Punjabiness would probably be more of an issue on the nation's ethnic battleground than his Bengaliness. But did any of it really have anything to do with Karim and me?

Despite our closeness from the time of our births, I never made the claim that Karim was like a brother to me. I knew too many brothers to say a thing like that. But I believed that somewhere beneath skin and blood and bone, somewhere beyond personality and reflex, somewhere deep within the marrow of our marrow, we were the same. And so nothing in either of our lives needed to be inexplicable to the other; it was just laziness or stubbornness that created occasional baffled moments between us. But supposing that wasn't true...supposing there was something standing between us that neither of us could bulldoze our way through. I looked out into the gathering darkness and tried to imagine what I would feel if I ever lost Karim.