‘Momin!’ Queenie suddenly burst in.
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ Momin said, shaking with silent laughter.
There was no time for anything else, for Isffy had appeared at the far end of the courtyard.
He held up his hands in triumph.
‘Fucked, fucked, fucked,’ he said joyfully, and bounded up to us. His laughter carried across the courtyard, and was lost in the cavity above. I could hear the screech of his
trainers against the stone; his voice rang out loud and hollow. A mobile phone gleamed in his hands, and he held it out as though challenging one of us to reach for it. He was sweaty and
breathless. ‘Go on, anyone.’ For a moment, no one responded, then Momin stretched out his hand.
Light crept into the heavy lines and pulpy texture of his face. He remained expressionless as he read, until a smile of sly mischief animated his mouth.
‘Jaani!’ he said, guffawing lightly, his large mass beginning to tremble. ‘It’s too good,’ he breathed, passing the phone quickly to Queenie. Her face was bathed in
its white revealing glow. The polish of lipstick, foundation dust, the hollow shine of coloured contact lenses – all now became visible. She read a little more than Momin had: ‘Mirwaiz,
jaani, you know I love you.’ Her laughter bubbled out of her. Isffy had joined the chorus, when at last the phone made its way to me. I read under the pressure of their reactions:
Why have
you gone? I’m so upset. Mirwaiz, jaani, you know I love you. Please come back to me
and I will make everything OK. Tonight.
‘But . . .’
‘Scroll up,’ Isffy said, ‘and you’ll see.’
I did; and seeing that the recipient – and now sender – was Mir Anwar, I realized what had happened: Mirwaiz, Mir Anwar. Such an easy mistake for agitated hands to make!
And I could not help but think of the cruel indifference of the technology that had
landed it in the wrong hands, and now, further exposed it before a hooting crowd.
‘So then,’ Isffy was saying, ‘Narsu realizes what has happened and sends a second message to say, “Sorry for that, Mir Anwar; that earlier message was meant for my
nephew.” But obviously our Meeru had, by then, guessed the truth, and came running to tell me that he had some important info about our dear Narsu, info he could only share in person. But no
sooner had we sat down just now than he forwarded me Narsu’s message; I nearly fell out of my chair.’
‘What did you tell him?’ Momin asked.
Isffy feigned an expression of concern. ‘I said, “You should go to Abba with this.” ’ Then he choked with laughter.
The others howled. ‘No! You didn’t.’
‘I did, I did,’ Isffy said, ‘I very much did. But what is more important is that
he
did.’
Introducing a kind of false earnestness into his voice, Isffy began, ‘He wrote it in front of me: “Mian saab, I received this somewhat irregular message from Narses. I thought you
should know about it. I cannot keep anything from you. He says it’s for his nephew.” And then he forwards him the whole message!’
‘Oh my God,’ Queenie said, ‘he’s quite a character, this Mir Anwar. I can’t believe he could tell your father.’
‘My father’s ears, darling, are always open to informers,’ Isffy said, ‘even if they happen to be informing on the Head of Intelligence.’
Momin chuckled, and wetly clearing his throat, said, ‘Then what?’
‘Nothing,’ Isffy exclaimed, widening the space between his fingers so as to create an air of mystery. ‘For many minutes, absolutely nothing. We ordered a drink and sat down to
wait. We finished it and ordered another, and still not a peep out of Abba. Then just five minutes ago, as I was getting up to leave, Meeru’s phone beeps. A message from Abba. I can just
fucking imagine him writing it. No explanation, nothing. All he says is: “Mirwaiz is the driver.” That’s all. “Mirwaiz is the driver.” And you can just feel,’
Isffy said, chopping his hand against his palm, ‘the axe about to fall.’
* * *
I had not seen the sea in Port bin Qasim. In my last days there, it began to obsess me. I felt I needed it as a point of orientation, needed it to make real the possibility of
escape. I had a dream one night that I was in a taxi, driving down the grid-like streets. The sun was at a tilt, setting I was sure on the water, but where was the water? I would stop passers-by to
ask the way to the beach. They would each give elaborate directions and we would go further and further out of town. The city turned to cement shanties, all marks of municipality fell away; an
early twilight prevailed and headlights swept past us. But there was no sign of the sea. And yet, its moist air, high with the smell of fish, seemed so near. I was sure it was only metres away. At
last when the road turned to sand, I got out and began to run. But at every point when I was certain I would see its watery expanse, there was only deeper twilight and more sand. At last I could
make out a figure in this wilderness. I knew it instantly to be Mirwaiz; but he was changed. His hair was all gone, his face gaunt and ashen. He smiled mockingly at me, but spoke with the same
urgency with which he had told me on that first day that my father was the law. He now said, ‘Rehan, there is no sea; there never was one; they made it up.’
Some particle, some seed of my dream must have pierced the veil of the next morning, for when I asked Isffy if I might take a cab into town, he said, ‘There are no cabs. No cabs, no buses,
no metro; unless you count the tempos, there is virtually no public transport. But take Zulfi.’
I found this, for some reason, almost as chilling as if there had been no sea. And that was when I realized that what I craved was public space. So not the sea then, but the beach, the
promenade. I wanted to be near the chatter of people and the tread of feet; those things seemed to possess an inherent goodness in my mind while all that was private had acquired the fearful
seclusion of secrets, cruelty and blackmail. Never at any time in my life had I trusted so completely to the morality of a crowd.
The scene at home had begun to turn uglier. Isffy’s disclosure seemed to have had no effect and the blackmailer’s threats redoubled. He spoke of having shared the
video with people in the office, and Isffy, every day more paranoid, was certain he had received strange looks from his colleagues. The apparent failure of his revelation had drained Isffy of his
taste for intrigue. He now sought a rougher justice. He spoke of his blackmailer with such violence, visualizing Mirwaiz or Narses, that I became concerned for their safety.
His rage was like the rage of a child, but fertilized, I feared very much, by an adult imagination. Anyone could be its recipient, anyone who Isffy might think of as having betrayed him. And
this thought made me worry for myself, for I, too, had been nurturing a deceit. I was guilty of the greatest crime in both Isffy’s and my book: abandonment.
On the night of Marrakech I had decided to cancel my trip north to see my father. The thought of spending time with him now was frightening. I had heard too much, and seen too vividly his
imprint on Isffy for me to be able to meet him easily. I wanted to leave Port bin Qasim the way I came, by the Emirates flight. Not only this; by Tuesday of that week, I had chosen a day and booked
and paid for a ticket. I was not sure why I had acted secretly, except out of guilt that I was betraying Isffy. At the same time, I knew that there would be no fixed day on which my brother’s
troubles would be over. They had come in cycles for over a decade and seemed no nearer their end.
I had mustered just enough courage to tell him I was leaving, but I had done it in an offhand, unspecific way, as if I was a wandering spirit who might hit the road at any moment. My time with
him in Port bin Qasim had been marked by deep tenderness and affection. Affection that was expressed more through the merging of our routines than any outward declaration. And I could sense how
much he enjoyed being in my company. He seemed to like to show me off. It gave him perhaps the double pleasure, of on one hand exposing my father’s reputation to comment, on the other, of
presenting himself as a man not totally without family.
And yet, I had not been able to tell him that our first Marrakech was to be our last, that some mixture of Port bin Qasim’s repression and easy brutality had driven me away. It was the
thing with places like this: their malaise – except for the bad moments, which, I sensed would be swift and violent, like a release – could feel like tranquillity. But the malaise was
real and no sooner had I had an intimation of it than I was booked on the next flight out. Dubai that Friday at dawn; then, a few short hours in its purgatorial duty-free, and on to London.
With every passing day, I told myself that I would slip it into conversation, say something casual like, ‘Isffy, bro, my time here is almost up.’ But either the moment never came or
the courage failed me. By Thursday afternoon, I had still revealed nothing of my plans.
That day, when Isffy was at work, I went with Zulfi to the Emirates city office on the pretext that I wanted to do some shopping. Now it would be easy, I thought. Isffy would come home in the
evening, and I would tell him, as though I’d decided on a sudden whim, that I was leaving the next day, but would try to be back soon.
On the afternoon of my last day in Port bin Qasim, I thought often of Mirwaiz. Perhaps it was departure that made me think of arrival, and especially of that first arrival by rail, now five
years ago. Or, maybe I was still toying with secret ways of getting to the airport at dawn.
The airline office stood in the shade of a large tree on a sloping Port bin Qasim artery. It was glass-fronted and air-conditioned, with a faded American Express sticker on the
glass. Inside, yellowing pictures of metropolitan life in foreign cities were nailed to the ribbed wood-panelling on the walls. London scenes of Grenadiers and buses appeared alongside New York
views of city lights and red skies, the towers still there, the Pan Am building still the Pan Am building. The pedestrians had eighties hairstyles, and the cars were of simpler colours, shapes and
tyres. In one corner of the Sydney Opera House’s blue sky, a scrawl in black pen: ‘Rashid loves Ayesha’. The cool and shade of that office, with its window into the eighties,
deepened my desire for flight. It made the world beyond not only seem far away, but of an another era altogether, as if in some time of riches the two had met, and since then, gone their separate
ways. The yellowing pictures, unchanged over the years, and touched with a sense of longing, were like mementos of a ruined friendship.
I was leaning over the grimy surface of a thick glass table, under which brochures formed a collage of turquoise waters and inviting wildernesses, when my phone rang. The Emirates lady’s
red nails froze over the blue and red coupons, on which she pointed out my flight’s routing and timing, PBQ, DUB, LHR. I wanted her to go on, but she wanted me to take the call. I was afraid
it was Isffy, afraid that by some fraternal instinct he had guessed what I was doing; or, more simply, he had driven past and seen his car and bodyguard parked outside the Emirates office. I
retrieved the phone from deep within a pocket.
Mirwaiz! The relief! Expecting to hear his voice, with its mocking note of abandon, it was some seconds before I realized that the person on the other end was not Mirwaiz at all, but a girl. A
girl with a thin and frail voice, simpering almost; she pleaded with me to come quickly, she hadn’t known who else to turn to; my name had been on his list of dialled numbers; yes, he had
tried to hurt himself, but he was OK now; I was to come quickly; I was a Tabassum, I could help him somehow. He was too weak to talk, but he needed me; he said I was good and kind and would help;
she was his sister. She had come down from La Mirage after the attempt. No, not a hospital; he had been discharged. They were in the Kala Gulab, in the inner city.
A few seconds later, my ticket in my pocket, I was back in the car, making jolting progress down the sloping avenue. Zulfi thrust the gears between second and third, ducked
into side streets and flew past amber lights. The traffic screeched and honked at us, as Zulfi, by the sheer force of personality, broke lanes and zoomed up illegal openings, insinuating himself
into the patient rows of traffic. When the city closed around us, its hardened arteries clotted with donkey-carts and rickshaws, he redoubled his pressure, and with a persistent, nudging movement,
cleared the streets of their blockages. Not twenty minutes had passed before we were scanning rows of cheap hotels, their sleazy names projecting over the swelling street, searching for the Kala
Gulab.
I saw it first. A slim cramped building, with a pink sign and red retroflective letters shimmering beside a bendy black rose. Like all the others, it had a dim tunnel of a mouth, doorless and
black, opening onto the street. I told Zulfi to wait in the car and dived into it. With my eyes still adjusting to the sudden darkness, I caught hold of a flimsy banister and hauled myself up the
stairs, stopping briefly on each landing to see the numbers on the doors. The corridors stank of disinfectant; on each level, a tinted transom gave onto the torrid street below, thick with traffic
and brown smoke. On the third floor, I could just make out room number seven. I banged hard on the door and it gave way instantly to a tiny cubbyhole.
There was space for nothing save a single bed, a chair, and a white-plywood dresser on which lay deodorants, bottles of cologne, tweezers and a vivid bouquet of plastic lilies. Mirwaiz, I
observed, even in this abyss of despair, had not forgotten his toiletries.
But for his hair, which was still long, he looked like the man from my dream. His cheeks were sunken; his temples had hollowed, the lips were thin and chapped; an unclean beard grew over the now
deeper contours of his face. He lay on the white plywood bed and was covered up to his neck in a creased sheet. By his side sat his sister, who bore more likeness to the handsome man I had met on
my arrival than the one now lying before me in the narrow bed.
When she saw me, she stood up, and bowing slightly, helped prop up her brother against the wall. He, in turn, looked briefly at her, and by way of re-introduction, said: ‘The earthquake
one, for whom I had gone to get the picture of the lake, remember?’