Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Zia turned into an alley, slightly wider than the first, and drew up to a gate that looked brown but turned out to be rusted. He parked his car half on the street, half on the narrow pavement that ran along one side of the road.

Karim and I stepped out of the car at the same time, and Karim stretched, his shirt rising up as he did so, revealing a raised chicken-pox scar just above the waistband of his jeans and a line of hair leading downwards from his navel. He caught me looking at the scar and glanced at it self-consciously.

‘I have one,’ I said, and showed him the discoloured scar on my elbow. He touched it.

‘Mine’s bumpier,’ he said, and raised his shirt so I could see it again.

‘Is it?’ It obviously was. I ran my finger over the scar. He breathed in suddenly, just as I touched him, and a gap opened up between his flat stomach and his jeans.

I didn’t move my hand away, and he smiled, stomach muscles still contracted. ‘You’re cold. Gave me a shock.’

‘You have goldfish on your boxers,’ I said, looking down, and he laughed and exhaled.

‘Are you guys coming?’ Zia called out. He was peering over the rusty gate, and holding up a hand in greeting to someone on the other side. A man with a white streak in his hair – paint or pigmentation? – opened the gate. We walked into a large open space, littered with billboards and prone steel poles; various men who’d been sipping tea and talking in the compound stood up and drew near Zia as Bilal – the man who had opened the gate – called Zia’s attention to a billboard standing flush against the far wall.

‘Oh!’ I couldn’t help exclaiming.

It was Zia. Or Zia’s head, rather, ten times its usual size, looking with delight at Zia’s ten-times too large hand squeezing white liquid out of an inflated pink glove into Zia’s wide and fleshy mouth. ‘Uh, Zia?’

‘I have no idea, Raheen. I have no idea what that is.’

Karim had been wandering around the compound, examining brushes stiff with paint and pretending to make a feat of balancing on the wide poles, but now he came up and looked at the painting and as soon as he started laughing I knew exactly what the pink glove was.

‘Bet this is where the slogan goes,’ I said, pointing to a blank patch of canvas.

‘But what am I selling?’ Zia said.

Karim and I grinned at each other.

‘Some new brand of milk,’ I said. ‘Probably with a name like human kindness.’

‘And the slogan: UDDERLY FRESH!’ Karim said.

We exchanged glances and burst into laughter, laughing so hard we had to hold on to each other for support. And then we weren’t laughing any more, but his arms were around me, my chin on his shoulder, his neck just centimetres away from my mouth, and I thought, how easy it is, how easy it can be. Where have you been all these years, Karim? Where have I been?

At the periphery of my vision, I was aware of Zia looking at us, his mouth open, a look of surprise, almost wonder, in his eyes.

Bilal had disappeared into the small concrete shelter in one corner of the compound and now he emerged with tea in flower-patterned cups. We took a cup each, and Karim sat beside me on a horizontal pole, his legs crossed at the ankles. He didn’t say anything, or even sit as close as I hoped he would, but my world shimmered at the languor with which he caressed the flower pattern on the teacup, tracing the petals with his index finger, sliding his thumb up and down the stem, just prior to raising the cup to his lips. It was enough to make me wish I was porcelain, hollow and filled with hot liquid. I pulled his ear lobe and he smiled and kicked me gently.

‘So I’m sorry about that last letter to you,’ I said. ‘I pretty much harangued you, didn’t I?’

‘Yeah, well, I’m sorrier about mine. The cut-up letters.’

I bit my lip and turned my face towards the sun so that he couldn’t see the tears that had rushed to my eyes. Until he said it, I’d had no idea how much I needed to hear that from him.

‘I had only just found out,’ he continued. ‘I guess you must have known for quite a while by then. But I only found out the day before I got your letter, and when I read it I thought I heard certain traits echoing.’ He stopped to look at my face as I struggled to remember. What must I have known for quite a while by then? Was there some mass carnage, or something along those lines, that made my comments about ‘Mr. Compassionate-Sitting-in-London’ and ‘when we laugh it’s survival’ particularly tasteless?

I ran one finger along his eyebrow, feeling the soft hairs ruffle against my skin. ‘Things look different when you’re living here, Karim. Now that you’re back, you’ll see that.’

Karim pulled back and caught me by the wrists. ‘What are you saying? That none of it made you angry?’

‘But what good would that have done?’ Did he think my anger would terrify the city into stopping its crazed behaviour?

He leaned forward, his chest pressing against my palms. I thought he was going to kiss me, and I glanced around – a Karachi girl’s instinctive move in such a situation – to ensure Bilal and the others weren’t looking. But his face remained several inches away from mine. ‘Ra, you can tell me the truth. We don’t have to be on opposite sides.’

‘I am telling you the truth.’

He let go of my wrists and stood up. ‘Raheen, you wouldn’t have sent me that essay if you didn’t… The two people in that city, what’s that damn name, Ray… Rye… Ray…?’

‘Raya? What does that have to do with this?’

‘Raya. Yes, the ones who reflected the attitude of that Faiz poem. The selfishness, the weakness, of certain kinds of love.’

I shook my head. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. I was trying to say…well, I was trying to say that I wish you hadn’t left.’

Karim blinked once, twice, three times. He turned around, his back to me, and put his hand over his eyes. ‘That’s it? That was about you and me?’

‘Isn’t that enough?’

‘No,’ he said. It was a wounded sound.

I stood up and put my hands on his shoulder. ‘Karim, I don’t understand why that letter of mine made you so angry.’

He went completely still. ‘You don’t understand?’ He looked around him as though trying to find his bearings. He faced me again and his lips moved, as though he were rehearsing words, but nothing came out.

I didn’t know what to say or do, so I simply took his hand in mine.

He wrenched away from me. ‘I’m tired. I should probably go to Zia’s and sleep for a while.’ He walked towards the gate without looking back, calling out to Zia that it was time to leave. On his way out, I saw him reach back to his shoulder blade. He brushed off the rooster feather that had fallen from the branch above, and continued walking.

. .

Minutes later, Zia’s car stalled.

We weren’t out of Mehmoodabad yet; Zia had attempted a short cut which brought us into a narrow, deserted alley lined with shops that still had their shutters down. The painted sign above one of the shops said ‘mata hari school uniforms’, but although both Karim’s eyes and mine turned towards it neither of us pointed it out to the other.

Zia and Karim got out of the car and Zia propped open the bonnet, but it was clear he did that only because people in movies always responded to breakdowns in that manner. I got out also and stood beside them, despite the internal voice that sounded a lot like Sonia warning me I’d only call attention to myself, and who knows what strange types were wandering around the deserted streets at this hour, and perhaps I should at least cover my bare arms with my dupatta.

‘We’re near Parsi colony,’ Karim said. ‘Uncle Zerxes – my father’s friend from the linen industry – lives there. Ten-minute walk.’ He was looking at Zia, assiduously avoiding my eye.

Ten minutes? That was how long it would take to walk from my house to Zia’s and I’d never once done anything but drive over. And those were streets I knew. I looked down the alley. How dangerous a section of town was Mehmoodabad? I couldn’t be sure.

‘Guys,’ Karim said, softly, ‘there’s someone coming.’

Zia and I turned and saw a moustached man walking towards us.

‘Having trouble?’ he said. He was wearing sneakers with his shalwar-kameez. Nike. Undoubtedly fake.

‘No, we’re fine. Just waiting for some friends. Thank you.’ Zia tried to look confident and relaxed as he spoke, and I reached into the car and pulled out Zia’s mobile phone. Quite why I thought that should intimidate the man, I don’t know, but it gave me a feeling of power.

The man laughed. ‘It’s all right. I mean no harm. But I just wanted to ask if you had any anti-theft devices in the car. That might be why you’ve stalled.’

I looked helplessly at the phone. I didn’t even know what the number for the police was.

Zia smacked his hand to his forehead. ‘Yes. Stupid of me. I forgot to press the thief switch.’

‘The what?’ Karim said.

‘Thief switch. It’s a little button. Can be placed anywhere in the car. See? Mine’s next to the ignition.’ Zia guided Karim’s hand in through the open car window and made him feel the button. ‘If you don’t press it within a few seconds of starting the engine it cuts off the petrol supply and the car stalls. So if someone’s trying to steal the car and they don’t press the switch the car just stops, destroying their quick getaway. My father had mine put in only a few days ago; I’m still not used to it.’

Zia turned to the fake-Nike man. ‘Thanks,’ he said, and offered the man a cigarette. The man produced a match and the two of them lit up. I stepped on Zia’s toe, trying to draw his attention to my unhappiness about standing around in the middle of a deserted road with some unknown man, but he just moved his foot away.

‘Are you a mechanic?’ Zia said.

The man shook his head. ‘Car thief.’

‘You going to steal my car?’ Zia tried to sound casual.

The man looked offended. ‘After I’ve taken a cigarette from you?’ He shook his head again. ‘Besides, I wouldn’t take your car and leave you stranded when you’re in the company of a girl. These are unsafe times. And it’s obvious you don’t live around here.’

‘That’s very decent of you.’ Zia regarded me triumphantly, as though he’d won a point.

‘Where do you think we live?’ Karim said.

‘Defence.’

Karim laughed. ‘Right. That obvious, huh?’

The man nodded. ‘Burgers,’ he said. Karim look confused. When he’d left Karachi we were still unaware of this term that most of Karachi used to refer to the English-speaking elite.

‘Have you been doing this long?’ I asked.

He looked straight at me for the first time. ‘I wanted to join the civil service. I’m an educated, literate person, you know. I sat for the exam, and I did all right. I mean, not top marks, but decent, good marks. But I sat the exams from Karachi. It’s not enough to be just good.’ He looked from Zia to Karim to me. ‘You know?’

That was probably just a rhetorical question, but I felt compelled to respond. ‘We’re Karachiwallahs, too,’ I said, the word stumbling on my tongue. It just seemed a bad idea to use the more Anglicized ‘Karachiite’. And then, because I was annoyed with Karim, I added: ‘At least, the two of us are. He—’ jerking my head at Karim, ‘—hasn’t been here in eight years. He lives in England and America. Both.’

The man whistled. ‘What a hero! Do you understand why I’m a car thief instead of a civil servant, hero?’

‘Yes,’ Karim said softly. ‘The quota system.’

The man spat on the side of the road. ‘May those who set it up burn in every kind of fire that hell has to offer.’

I caught Zia’s sleeve, my eyes begging Let’s get out of here.

The man caught my look. ‘Why are you afraid of me? I have sisters. I’m not one of those uncivilized men. But I get frustrated. Don’t you? You live in this city, after all.’

There was nothing I could say to this man without it being condescension or a lie. Privilege erased the day-to-day struggles of ethnic politics, and however Karim might want me to feel about the matter I couldn’t pretend I was sorry that I had been born on ‘this side of Clifton Bridge’ where class bound everyone together in an enveloping, suffocating embrace, with ethnicity only a secondary or even tertiary concern. So what if I walked around with a heaviness in my heart after reading about the accelerating cycle of violence, unemployment, divisiveness in Karachi? So what if I agreed with this man that the quota system in the province discriminated against Karachiites, particularly Muhajirs who had no family domicile outside the city that they could claim as their own when government jobs and government-run university places were being allocated according to an absurd urban – rural divide? So what if I thought the entire city was being pillaged by the central government, which was happy to take the large percentage of its revenue from Karachi but unwilling to put very much back? I didn’t find myself picking up a gun because of it, or losing people I loved because of it, or feeling my sanity slip away because of it.

‘You’re Muhajir,’ I heard Karim say to the man. For God’s sake, what was he trying to do!

‘Yes, hero. What are you?’

‘Bengali.’

Zia and I both looked at him in surprise. I’d never once heard Karim identify himself that way. Of course, none of us ever used to feel the need to identify ourselves by ethnicity when we were younger but it still took me off-guard that he chose to identify himself with his mother’s ethnicity rather than his father’s. I wondered if Zia even remembered that school-yard fight when he had pushed Karim over and kicked him. I wondered if Karim remembered it.

The man straightened up. ‘We didn’t learn anything, did we? From ’71.’

Again, Karim gave me one of those looks I couldn’t decipher. ‘We learned to forget,’ he said. ‘Do you have a family to support?’

‘Everyone has a family to support. If not your own, then someone else’s. My brother has five children. The choices my brother’s made…soon I’ll have his family to support. And then there’ll be his widow – I’ll have to marry his widow, who else will marry her with five children? – and she sings all day, so badly, like a goat.’ Zia and the man both laughed, but the man’s laugh had an edge of bitterness to it.

‘I can’t do anything about the quota system,’ Karim said, ‘but maybe we could help you find something better suited to your education than car theft.’

The man nodded, all traces of amusement gone. ‘Already I can imagine myself doing things that a few months ago would have been unthinkable. I own a gun, and I’m imagining things. That’s not a good combination.’ He grimaced. ‘You’ll probably leave here and do nothing for me, but if you can do something, do it quickly.’

‘How will I find you?’ Karim said.

‘Come back here in this car. I’ll tell my friends to look out for it, and make themselves known to you.’ He shook Karim’s hand, and walked away.

‘Your father could get him a job, couldn’t he?’ Karim said, turning to Zia.

Zia looked ready to explode. ‘Did you just miss what he said? His friends the car thieves will be looking out for my Integra. And now he knows where the thief switch is. You are behaving like such a fresh-off-the-boat, Karim. Don’t buy his “I’m forced into crime because I have no options” story.’

‘Oh, come on, Zia, it’s not as though his story was far-fetched.’ I pointed towards the thief switch as Zia started the car and he nodded and pressed it.

‘If it’s true, that makes things worse,’ Zia said, screeching off, clearly as keen to get out of Mehmoodabad as I was. ‘He’s probably with the MQM and you just don’t want to get involved with someone who has anything to do with these political groups.’

‘Why is he obviously with the MQM?’ I said. ‘He didn’t mention political affiliations.’

‘It’s the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, isn’t it? And he’s a Muhajir with grievances. Two plus two equals four.’

‘I’m a Muhajir, Zia.’ I poked his shoulder.

‘Oh, don’t give me that. You’re nothing. You’re just a burger. And thank God for that.’

‘You macho Sindhi ass,’ I said with a yawn. It was too early in the morning for a full-length replay of this little exchange – one that Zia and I trotted out every so often almost as a set routine – which deflected the differences in our backgrounds.

‘Only half my ass is Sindhi. The other half is Punjabi.’

Karim didn’t join our laughter. When I turned to look at him, his eyes were wide, terrified. ‘I shouldn’t have come back,’ he said.

Zia reached over and touched my knee then. He saw how hurt I was by the comment, but Karim was oblivious. I thought of another car ride, heading to, rather than from, the airport. Karim had sat opposite me and drawn a map and even the fact that he couldn’t have known it was the last time we were to be together for the next seven years didn’t temper the corrosiveness of that memory. Look up, I had wanted to say then. I’m here. But he hadn’t looked at me then and he wasn’t looking at me now.

‘Well, then, go home,’ I said. ‘If you have a home to go to.’

‘Raheen, cool it,’ Zia said.

‘Let her continue, Zia.’ Karim crossed his arms and looked at me in the manner of an eagle staring down a sparrow.

‘There’s really nothing more to say. Why don’t you turn around and leave, and I’ll draw you a nice map of all the places you might have visited while you were here. I’m sure for you that’ll be better than actually having to deal with the realities of this place and the people in it.’

‘Why the hell do you keep harping on about maps?’ he said.

I didn’t have the first idea how to respond to that one. We continued to glare at each other, while Zia turned the music up again and started singing along boisterously, as though he were listening to hard rock rather than a qawaali. Why did I keep harping on about maps? How had they become the symbol of everything that had gone so wrong, so inexplicably, in my relationship with Karim?

‘Strabo and Eratosthenes,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was going to talk to you about on the phone the other day.’

‘Yes?’ He looked at me cautiously, as though he thought I was drawing him closer just so that I could hit him over the head with a mallet.

I had first encountered mention of the two of them while researching a paper on Homer at college, and that’s really when I decided it was time to get in touch with Karim again, although I had to wait until I wrote that Calvino paper before I was able to decide how to make the first move. Eratosthenes, the grandfather of cartography, was the first man to make a distinction between scientific and literary mapping. Prior to Eratosthenes, no one ever said that cartography should concern itself with science and facts rather than stories; the distinction didn’t really exist. The Odyssey was considered as valuable a tool of mapping as were the charts and eyewitness accounts of sailors and travellers. But Eratosthenes’ decision removed Homer, and all other poets, from the corpus of cartography.

In the furore over this move, which lasted through generations, Eratosthenes’ greatest critic was the cartographer Strabo, who said that Homer depicted geographical truths in the language of poetry, so it was absurd to deny him a role in the realm of cartography. I loved the idea of those early cartographers who thought Odysseus’ voyage was as valid a source for map-making as the charts of travellers who had actually set sail themselves.

Back then, of course, maps weren’t used for travel. They were mainly used for illustrating stories. There stands Mount Olympus. That’s where Theseus fought the Minotaur. That kind of stuff. So maps weren’t about going from point A to point B; they were about helping someone hear the heartbeat of a place. I explained this, and then I reached for Karim’s hand and held it at the very tips of his fingers. He didn’t draw away. ‘Seems to me like we’re Strabo and Eratosthenes, Karimazov. I want you to pay attention to the stories that define Karachi, and you want to know what the name of the road connecting Gizri to Zamzama is, and how many people have died there in the last year.’

But even as I said all that, I wondered why any of it should have been anything more than a minor irritation in our friendship. And then I was back, again, to the question I had asked so many times it even invaded my dreams: what did I do to make him cut up my letters?

His hand closed on my wrist so tightly I almost cried out. ‘You want to hear the heartbeat of a place? Do you know how hard your heart beats when you’re lost? Do you know what it is to wander out of the comfort of your own streets and your own stories?’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Which stories do you want me to pay attention to? Or, more to the point, which stories have you deliberately turned away from, Ra, and why?’

I pulled my wrist out of his grip and then turned away from Zia’s uncertain, sympathetic, exasperated eyes, which were meant as much for Karim as for me. I cranked up the volume of the music as high as it would go, so that none of us could hear our own thoughts.

All around us, Karachi kept moving.

. .

1971

‘Of course there won’t be war,’ said Asif, running his fingers through his luxurious mass of hair. ‘Everyone’s playing brinkmanship, that’s all. Here’s what’ll happen: Mujib will back down on his Six Points, give up the whole idea of a decentralized federal system of government in exchange for some political and economic concessions towards East Pakistan. Once he does that, Yahya will invite him to form the government, and at that point Bhutto will also take his place as leader of the opposition. It’s the only sane, rational, not to mention cheerful, choice. Mujib’s no zealous revolutionary, and, besides, whatever the Bengali masses might want, they’re just rabble, and our army will decimate them if they try to make some kind of one-legged stand. No one wants to be slaughtered.’ He snapped his fingers at the Ampi’s waiter and asked for more ice.

‘No one wants to be enslaved either,’ Maheen said, waving down at Laila and her new husband, who had entered and taken a table on the ground floor. ‘Yasmin, don’t you love what she’s wearing?’

‘My God, she is so gorgeous. What does she see in him?’ Asif shook his head. ‘And come on, Maheen, isn’t enslaved a little too dramatic a word?’

‘Nothing dramatic about it,’ Ali said. ‘Just look at the statistics.’

‘Oh, you and your statistics,’ Asif said with a laugh.

‘Well, but just think about it. East Pakistan is the majority wing of the country in terms of population, and yet…’ He started to count off his fingers, ‘It gets less than 30 per cent of foreign aid allocation, less than 20 per cent of civil service jobs, less than 10 per cent of military positions, fewer schools, fewer universities, it makes up near 70 per cent of the country’s export earnings but receives the benefits of less than 30 per cent of our import expenditure.’

‘All these stupid bloody politicians on their own power trips,’ Zafar said, picking up the menu and looking at the dessert section. ‘Why don’t Mujib and Bhutto just have a duel to the death, pistols at dawn, and leave the rest of us out of it?’

‘It’s not that simple, Zafar,’ Ali said, folding his napkin neatly into a little square.

‘Well it’s not the little numbers game you make it out to be either, Ali.’

Maheen put a hand on her fiancé’s arm. ‘Jaanoo, Ali’s right. Look, Asif, I wish – really, really, I wish and pray – that everything could be easily resolved, but you’re deluding yourself if you think the Bengali people’s demands are going to go away, because I don’t know if they’ll even accept a federation at this point when the word Independence has gone around and it’s such a more soul-stirring word than federation.’

‘Ah, but you don’t know what I know,’ Asif said.

‘And what’s that?’

‘That just today Yahya told newsmen that his talks with Mujib were satisfactory, and that Mujib will be the next Prime Minister of Pakistan. They’ve reached a compromise, Maheen; I’m sorry, but your soul will have to do with being a little less stirred.’

‘God’s sake, Asif, she’s lived all her life in Karachi,’ Yasmin said. ‘She’s not…’

‘Not what?’ Maheen turned to her friend. ‘One of them?’

There was a yelp from below. The waiter had spilt a drink on Laila. Her husband stood up and cracked a slap across the waiter’s cheek. ‘Halfwit Bingo! Go back to your jungle.’

Zafar stood up. Ali and Asif pulled him down.

Laila grabbed her husband’s arm and whispered something. He looked up at Maheen, and turned red. ‘It’s a new sari,’ he called out in Maheen’s direction, pointing at Laila’s stained clothes. ‘I got angry, can you blame me? No hard feelings, OK, Maheen?’

Maheen shrugged noncommittally, which seemed to satisfy him. He sat down and resumed eating. Laila continued looking up, but Maheen refused to meet her eye.

‘It’s going to get worse,’ Yasmin said.

‘How much worse can it get?’ Zafar sighed. He slipped his hand into Maheen’s palm beneath the table, but her fingers didn’t curl around his in response. She was looking at the Bengali waiter. He walked past and caught her eye, and for a moment the barriers of class and gender became porous and something passed between them that Zafar couldn’t quite identify. Maheen’s hand slipped out of Zafar’s. He turned his face away from her, and saw Yasmin and Ali looking at Maheen, their faces moulded into identical expressions of concern. It was so brief he was almost unsure it happened, but for an instant he felt a most alien and inexplicable sensation of jealousy.

‘A lassi stand. I’m going to set one up right here,’ Yasmin declared. ‘I’ll mint millions.’

‘Right here? In the middle of the racecourse stands? Excellent idea. And how do you think Ali will react to being married to the Lassi Lassie?’ Zafar asked, fanning Yasmin with his newspaper.

‘Oh, that’s heaven, Zaf, thanks. Ali is not one of those Neanderthal men who expect their wives to stay at home. Done the crossword yet?’

‘No. You like crosswords? Is that Neanderthal comment a swipe at me? What makes you think I’d want Maheen to stay at home?’

‘It’s not about what you want, Zafar, it’s what Maheen wants that matters.’

Zafar tried to work out exactly what he’d said that was so objectionable. Hard to tell with Yasmin. Ever since that time she’d rebuffed him in the Nasreen Room he’d been too aware that he frequently misread her. For a moment he stopped to wonder how different things might have been if she had responded with more warmth to his suggestion. Impossible to imagine. Already it seemed a lifetime ago, and he honestly couldn’t remember why it was that when Ali had reintroduced him to Maheen and Yasmin, both of whom he’d known only vaguely before Oxford, he’d looked longer and with more interest at Yasmin. ‘I always manage to irritate you, don’t I? Even when I’m in complete agreement with you. I really wish you liked me more.’

Yasmin looked at him, surprised. ‘I don’t dislike you. But you were a bastard to me once and I haven’t quite forgotten it.’

‘Me? When? I would never… What did I do?’

Yasmin shook her head. What was she doing? It could only do harm to revisit the past, particularly when he was wearing the same black shirt – why did he always have to wear black, even in the heat of Karachi’s days, and why did he always have to look so good in it? She gripped her finger with its engagement ring. And more important than that, why did she still have to entertain these thoughts about this…boy, when every day she learnt something new about Ali, and every day felt more strongly than the day before how lucky the two of them were to have found themselves alone on that balcony on Asif’s farm. ‘Never mind. Nothing. I’m just joking. Oh look, there’s Anwar.’ She pointed out the curly-haired man on the other side of the racecourse stands. ‘Poor Anwar and Dolly. There can’t be anything worse than the death of a child.’

‘Rumour is, it wasn’t a stray bullet at all.’ Zafar looked at his watch. ‘Where are Maheen and Ali? The race is about to begin.’ Below, the horses were being led on to the track.

‘Oh, rumours are all the rage these days,’ Yasmin replied, relieved he’d changed the subject. ‘Just heard one that the fat cats are going to have the National Assembly building in East Pakistan bombed; that way work on it will never be completed and the National Assembly will never convene and Mujib will never become PM. You don’t really believe what they say about the shooting, do you? How could Dolly and Anwar continue living where they do if that were true?’

‘Speaking of rumours, I think we’re going to start one if the two of us are seen alone at the races.’ He smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. Was that an inappropriate comment, Zafar wondered. He hastened to return to the earlier subject of conversation. ‘I hear Dolly wants to move. But Anwar’s been acting so strangely. They say he still hasn’t shed a tear about the whole thing. And look who he’s sitting down with. Here, look through the binoculars. See him? With a bunch of your aforementioned fat cats. He’s been avoiding all his old friends since the…since. Only ever see him now with the kind of people who should make anyone sick.’

‘Maybe they’re all talking about bombing the National Assembly.’

‘Probably talking about Bhutto’s little speech yesterday.’ He drummed his fingers on the newspaper headlines.

‘Revolution from the Khyber to Karachi if the NA convenes without him. It would be nice to dismiss that as rhetoric. Some nights I can’t sleep for terror.’ If this is how I feel, Yasmin thought, how must Maheen feel, a Bengali living in West Pakistan? And every day someone new seemed to succumb to the madness that was sweeping the country, someone new said things that defied all understanding, and it was hard to say which were worse: the people who stopped dead, mid-sentence, as soon as Maheen entered the room, or the ones who kept on talking.

‘The race really is about to begin now,’ Zafar said. No escape from talk about it, not even here at the racecourse with Yasmin. It was a physical ache, this burden of trying to be some kind of refuge for Maheen; every day more comments to deflect, ignore, make light of. In the beginning it was easy enough: hell, it came naturally. But now, oh God, now… ‘Where are they?’ He looked at his watch again. ‘Ali was supposed to pick her up half an hour ago.’