Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

‘Yes. I said if they made a road through the mangrove swamps it would cut down the drive to the beach by at least fifteen minutes.’

‘Must have given you a thrill. Driving through the road you predicted.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about roads, Raheen.’

‘Not even for a second?’

He smiled. ‘Maybe half a second.’

‘Mangrove swamps are an endangered species,’ I said.

A wave lurched at us, soaking our lower bodies, washing the seaweed away.

‘I don’t want to see him again. My father. Not ever.’ Karim didn’t say anything. ‘Well, that’s what you want me to say, isn’t it?’ I leaned back on the rock, feeling physically sick. ‘All this time I’ve been trying to understand what had gone wrong between us. I thought it had something to do with maps or my reaction to newspaper headlines or telling you that you’ve become a foreigner, and all along you just wanted me to say I hate my father. That’s all.’ I looked out at the waves curling into themselves and breaking, grey-white, and I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. ‘That’s all.’

‘I thought you knew. I really thought you knew. You were asking questions before I left, Raheen. You were asking my father and Uncle Asif. In a place like Karachi where everyone knew, and plenty of people love breaking bad news, how could I know you’d never find anyone who’d tell you?’

‘Well, a funny thing happened. I stopped asking.’

‘Why?’

It was that gorgeous moment of sunset when the most vibrant colours in the world are pulled towards the sun, the sky shot through with every shade of purple and red and yellow, and everything else darkening. I could remember it all quite clearly now: Aunty Maheen saying to my father, ‘Don’t tell me that feelings can’t change; don’t you dare be the one to tell me that,’ and my parents’ argument afterwards, frightening enough to my sense of order that I had decided I would not ask about this again, not even if it killed me.

‘Because I was smart.’ I almost started crying again. ‘Why did I have to know? What does it benefit us to know? He’s been a good father, Karim, he’s been better than that. You knew how much I idolize, how much I idolized – oh, fuck tenses! You thought I knew what he had done and you never bothered to say you were sorry.’

I jumped down to the sand, lost my footing and fell over in the cold water, my elbow gashing red against a jut of rock. When he reached down to help me, I pushed him away. ‘You found out what he’d said, you thought I’d found out too, and instead of taking even half a second to think of how that would have made me feel you mutilated my letters and sent me maps.’

‘Oh, come on, Ra.’ He pushed himself off the rock. ‘If you can’t understand that instead of thinking about you I’d be thinking about my mother and what he put her through, then you really are the most self-absorbed person I’ve ever met.’

‘Oh, no, you can’t. You can’t accuse me. I’m the perfect friend now.’ I knew I was being absurd but I couldn’t stop. ‘You wanted me to hate my father. My one failure was my refusal to hate my father. Well, I’ve told you now: I want nothing more to do with him. You happy? You miserable bastard, haven’t I just lived up to all your wildest expectations?’

‘I didn’t want you to hate him, Raheen. I wanted you to stop being him.’ He grabbed my hands. ‘He thought he could pretend the war and everything going on had nothing to do with him, or with her; he pretended and pretended that the outlines in which they lived didn’t matter, until one day it was at his door and things inside him that he never acknowledged, never tried to deal with, came out.’

‘We don’t know that’s how it happened.’

‘And you’re the same. You’re the same, Raheen. The city is falling apart and you’re the same. That’s why I sent you those maps. Because I wanted you to find a way to see beyond the tiny circle you live in.’

‘Karim, my world is falling to pieces and you’re still talking about maps!’

‘I’m not, I’m not. I’m talking about why I look at you and see him and can’t bear it or forgive you or be with you.’

Now all colour was leached from the day. We were shadows in a shadow world. The beach was always the one place I could go to and never stumble upon unpleasant memories, and now even that had been taken from me.

‘I don’t want anything more to do with either him or you. This friendship is over, Karim.’

He shook his head and walked past me. ‘Well done. You’ve just made the circle you live in that much smaller.’ No emotion was left in his voice. ‘Come on, then. We have to go to Sonia’s and tell her about the newspaper announcement. She’s the one whose world is falling to pieces. We’re just Punch and Judy by comparison.’

. .

Karim followed me to Soma’s house, in Zia’s car, the drive home excruciatingly long, involving traffic jams, an interminable wait at the railway crossing, and more red traffic lights than I normally encountered in a week of driving. Near the naval base, Rangers – the much-feared special police force deployed in Karachi to counter terrorism (so the official line had it) – were rounding up suspicious characters. Had Karim been in Zia’s Integra he might have looked well-connected enough to be allowed through, but given that he had never driven in Karachi, Zia had entrusted him with only a second-rate Corolla, the car that Zia used when he first learned to drive. There were too many glorious memories associated with that car for Zia to countenance the thought of getting rid of it, even though the beige paint had turned to rust in many places and the axle was prone to snapping. The Rangers flagged down Karim (‘young and male’, a synonym for suspicious) but I reversed back before he even got out of the car, almost knocking over a uniformed man, and told them that he was my cousin, following me home to ensure I wasn’t harassed by lafangas; surely they didn’t expect me, a lone woman, to drive without escort while they questioned him? They apologized and let him go.

Karim raised his hand in a gesture of thanks, but I didn’t acknowledge it. He thought I was capable of saying something as hurtful, as disgusting, as what my father had said to Aunty Maheen. Aba, how could you? Karim, how could you think I would ever? I wiped away my tears impatiently. Neither of them was worth crying over. But the traffic still blurred before my eyes all the way back to our part of town.

When we reached Sonia’s house, Dost Mohommad, the cook, was cycling out. Seeing us get out of our cars he hopped off the bicycle, beaming with delight.

‘Allah ka shukar, Raheen Bibi, Karim Baba, Allah ka shukar!’

‘What is it, Dost Mohommad?’ Karim asked.

‘That police nonsense is over. They came to say the case against Lohawalla Sahib has been dropped.’

‘Who came? What do you mean?’

‘The lawyers. They said they had a call from the police. No case. No charges. All over. The family has gone to give Lohawalla Sahib’s parents the good news in person.’ He clasped Karim’s hand, and shook it with gusto before cycling off again.

Karim and I looked at each other. He must have seen how blotched and red my face was but all he said was, ‘We still have to tell her about the newspaper announcement.’

‘I don’t see any need for you to be there when she’s told. You know, you’re pretty much a stranger in all our lives. I’ll break the news to her.’

Karim raised his eyebrows, unbearably superior. ‘With your customary tact and concern for others’ feelings? Planning to ask her how much her father paid to the right people to get the charges dropped?’

I turned away. That had been the thought that ran through my mind when Dost Mohommad gave us the news. ‘I’m going over to Zia’s now. To tell him about Sonia. Why don’t you go somewhere else? Go and draw a map.’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine.’

And we so left it.

At Zia’s there was an eerie flickering from the window of the annexe above the garage which Zia’s father had built to entice his son to return to Karachi for the summer and winter holidays during his years at college. His parents were denied entry to the annexe, though Zia often relaxed that rule for his mother. Among our friends, the annexe was known as Club Zia.

I walked up the stairs to the annexe door, and banged on it as loudly as I could. No response. I leaned over the banister, pulled a few almonds off the nearby tree, and threw them at the window from which the glow emanated.

Zia pushed open the window, waved, and came round to open the door. ‘Hey!’ he shouted.

I walked into his ‘den’ and switched off the LaserDisc player, which was relaying some action movie on to his widescreen TV, taking full advantage of the surround-sound speakers. ‘Hey,’ I replied without enthusiasm.

Zia slid behind the bar in the far corner of the vast room. ‘Come on, then. Spill your woes to the bartender.’

I sat down on the bar stool and rested my head on the gleaming black marble of the bar. ‘I just found out why my father’s engagement to Aunty Maheen broke off. Karim made him tell me.’

‘Oh, man. You really need a drink, then.’

I looked up at Zia, who was unscrewing the top of a bottle of Black Label. He poured a generous amount into a glass and topped it with ice and Coke.

‘You knew?’ I waved away the proffered glass.

‘Can’t let it go to waste. Not while people are dying of thirst.’ Zia tilted and straightened the glass, listening with satisfaction to the tinkle of ice. ‘Yeah, I’ve known for a while.’

‘How?’

‘The Anwar files.’

Everyone knew, though no one had ever seen them, that Zia’s father, Uncle Anwar, had files on anyone who was anyone, and many besides, in Karachi, detailing their illicit, illiberal and ill-advised activities. Uncle Anwar said the reason he never employed guards to protect his house was that people of consequence in Karachi had such a fear of his files falling into their enemies’ hands that they all deployed their trusted aides to keep a close watch on Anwar’s house to ensure no one broke in and stole the files (and these people never attempted to steal the files themselves, because they knew there would be a hundred eyes watching them).

‘There’s a file on my father?’

Zia sipped his Black Label and nodded. ‘I wasn’t looking for it. But I got hold of the key to the filing cabinet one day, and thought I’d see what there was on Sonia’s father. Don’t know why. Just because he hated me and didn’t want me near his darling daughter, I suppose. Anyway, I thought it would be good to have some dirt on him. You know, just so I could feel superior. I wasn’t going to do anything with the information. I don’t think. I must have been about fourteen or fifteen. And the end of “K” and the beginning of “L” were in the same cabinet, so while I was looking for “Lohawalla, Ehsan” I saw “Khan, Zafar” and I was so surprised I had to look. There was just one page. I think someone transcribed Shafiq’s description of what happened.’

‘And then?’

‘And then I closed the filing cabinet, and told my father to find a new hiding place for his key.’

‘Was there a “Khan, Yasmin” in there as well?’

Zia looked down into his drink and nodded. ‘I looked at that. Couldn’t help myself. It was just one line.’

‘Something like “She married Zafar after what he said to her best friend”?’

‘Yeah. Something like that.’

‘So you’ve known. All these years.’ I tried to fathom that. ‘Didn’t it change the way you felt about them?’

Zia unwrapped a packet of Marlboro Reds and turned one cigarette upside down, for luck. ‘I didn’t really think about it in terms of them.’ He lit up and took a drag. ‘They’re supposed to be my father’s friends. And he had files on them.’ Zia shook his head. ‘I didn’t know much about ’71—that year’s main significance for me is that it’s when my brother died – but I knew a thing or two about friendship. Why are you looking at me like that?’

I caught his wrist and traced the veins on it with my thumbnail. ‘You’ve still got the sexiest wrists in the world.’

Zia took another drag, but didn’t move his arm away. ‘And if you weren’t in love with Karim, and I wasn’t besotted by Sonia, who knows?’

I let go of his wrist. ‘Repeating patterns. We could end up together, and Sonia and Karim could end up together, and one pairing would work, and one wouldn’t.’

Zia lifted a fifty-paisa coin from the ashtray and blew off the clinging ash. ‘Heads, we divorce. Tails, we play marriage counsellors to Karim and Sonia.’ He placed the coin on his thumb and flipped it.

My parents hadn’t played marriage counsellors to Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen, but I always half-believed that the divorce wouldn’t have happened had Karim’s parents stayed in Karachi, in the company of my parents. My mother had tried to convince Uncle Ali to change his mind about immigrating, right until the last minute, but he wouldn’t listen to her. It was the only thing I ever saw her ask of him that he refused her. At the time, I had thought it was the worsening political situation that had driven him away, and it was only much later that I wondered if he wanted to put as much distance between Aunty Maheen and the Interloper as possible; but all he did was bring the situation to a head, and force Aunty Maheen to make that final, irrevocable choice.

It was the only really selfish day that I could point to in my parents’ lives: the day Aunty Maheen called to say she was divorcing Uncle Ali and moving to Boston with the man my parents had already known about, though Aunty Maheen had never admitted anything about him to either of them.

I remember how quickly Ami’s face lost its sparkle after she answered the phone and heard Aunty Maheen’s voice. I remember her saying, ‘No, Maheen. Say you’re not serious,’ her hand reaching out for my father’s hand as she spoke. When she hung up, they held each other in a way I wasn’t accustomed to seeing, and he had tears in his eyes even as he told her not to cry. They left me alone that evening, and went out to dinner together. It’s the only time I remember them going out to a restaurant and leaving me behind, and how angry I was with them for doing that. The tragedy wasn’t theirs, it was mine. Karim would be dividing his time between his parents. School term in London and holidays in Boston. So when would he ever come home? When would I see him? How was I supposed to go from day to day without the thought at the back of my mind that soon Karim would return and I had to store up every memory worth storing just so that I could repeat it to him? How to see the world without seeing it as a world I would replay for Karim soon, very soon, just a few more weeks now? How could I bear to think of what he was having to bear?

The coin bounced off the edge of the bar, and fell somewhere on Zia’s side. He shrugged. ‘Guess we’ll never know.’

I told him everything then. Starting with the conversation in Mehmoodabad and carrying on to the moment we left the beach. Zia listened without saying anything beyond the occasional ‘uh-huh’ or ‘and then?’ When I had finished he said something entirely unexpected. He said, ‘At least it’s all out in the open now.’

‘Oh, please, Zia, don’t talk rubbish. I don’t want to have to fight with you as well.’

Zia crunched a piece of ice between his teeth and pressed play on his CD remote control. Billie Holiday’s voice filled the room. I laughed. He could have such incongruous tastes.

‘I tried telling you once that you should talk to your father about why the engagement broke off.’

‘You did?’

‘Uh-huh. When we became friends again at college. Sonia and I sat down and talked about why Karim went so weird on you with that letter, and we sort of guessed that maybe he knew. Yeah, Sonia knows about it. Everyone knows about it. Both of us tried telling you to talk to your father. You really don’t remember this, do you? Every time we tried to bring the conversation round to the topic you just deflected it or ducked it, and it looked to both of us like you guessed it was something painful and you were trying really hard not to have to face it. So the question is: now you know that you have to face it, what are you going to do? Avert your eyes? Coyness doesn’t suit you, you know.’

‘I’m not averting anything. I’m disgusted with my father for what he said. And I’m disgusted with Karim for saying I’m a reflection of my father.’

‘You’ve always wanted to be a reflection of your father.’

‘Of the man I thought he was, Zia. Not the man he is.’

‘Rot,’ Zia said succinctly.

‘You think I could say something like that? Like what he said?’

‘I think you want life to be easy. I think that’s what worries Karim. Because it means imposing blindness on yourself.’

‘Why should I care what Karim worries about?’

‘Because there’s something about the two of you that’s almost magic.’

I looked at him to see if he was joking. ‘Magic’ was not the kind of word Zia was prone to using.

‘Seriously, yaar. Still is. When you were laughing together in Mehmoodabad, about that painting of me, I felt so…I felt jealous, Raheen. Not jealous jealous; not really jealous,’ he hastened to add, suddenly the cool guy again, refusing to admit any imperfections in his life. ‘It was just that I see you two and I know I’ll never have that.’

‘Zia.’ I put an arm on his shoulder.

‘No, I won’t. You said something to me a couple of years ago when I broke up with someone or other. You said, “There’s a ghost of a dream that you don’t even try to shake free of because you’re too in love with the way she haunts you.” That was a good line.’ He was silent for a moment. ‘But forget about me. My life’s too messed up even to begin to sort out. But you can sort out this thing that you and Karim have together. I don’t know exactly what’s going on in his head, but I know you. I know you’ve never fought for anything. Always easier to pretend it doesn’t matter enough to get bruised over. But, listen, if you have to bleed for Karim, bleed. Promise me you will.’

I loved him more in that moment than ever before. I stood up on the rung of the bar stool and reached over to hug him. ‘Don’t undersell yourself, sweetheart. You’re worth bleeding over too.’

‘But not by you.’

I kissed his cheek. ‘I have news for you.’

I told him about the newspaper announcement. I think I expected him to show some satisfaction about the news that Sonia was no longer engaged, but I was shamed entirely to see that he swore and clenched his fist and said, ‘When you tell her, you’ve got to force her to talk about it, Raheen. It’s doing her no good, holding everything in. She’ll fall ill. Can’t you see she’s already looking so run-down, she has to talk about it.’ He ground out his cigarette, his scowl deepening. ‘One touch of my father’s speed dial, and when that Adel creature gets back to Karachi I could have him met at the airport and thrashed within an inch, or maybe even a millimeter, or maybe even less…’

‘Zia! Stop talking like a goonda.’

Zia made a dismissive gesture in my direction. ‘You’re always so civilized, Raheen. People like the Ranas, they deserve to be treated like the animals they are. It’s only because Sonia’s father is in danger of losing all his money if he’s found guilty, that’s all there is to this.’

‘And you’re going to prove your great love by paying someone to break Adel Rana’s head with a hockey stick? Really macho, Zia.’

He banged the CD power button with the flat of his hand, switching off Billie’s ‘Strange Fruit’.

‘And anyway, Zee, if the issue is the money, Adel Rana will be feeling sick enough tomorrow when he finds out that the charges have been dropped and Daddy Lohawalla’s millions are intact.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. Dost Mohommad told Karim and me. All charges dropped.’ I paused to consider the strangeness of it. ‘If it had happened just a few hours earlier, Sonia would probably still be engaged.’

‘Oh God.’ Zia sat down.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You’d better leave, Raheen.’

‘What?’

‘Raheen, go. You don’t want to be in this house for what’s about to happen.’

‘Where do you want me to go?’

‘Anywhere.’ He looked up at me, arms wrapped around his stomach as if he was in severe pain. ‘Go home, Raheen. Go home.’

. .

To go home really wasn’t an option I felt in any state to exercise, so I drove back to Sonia’s house and sat outside in my car until one of the guards came out and told me I could wait inside. I had been sitting in the drawing room for only a few minutes when the front door opened and Karim walked in. We sat at opposite ends of the sofa in silence, leafing through coffee-table books. Easy for Zia to talk about magic, but once a spell is broken, pumpkins and rats appear.

At last Sonia and her family arrived home.

‘Have you heard?’ Sonia said, rushing forward to put her arms around me.

Karim stood up and shook Sonia’s father’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry you had to go through that, Uncle, but at least it’s over.’

‘Yes, thank God. Over.’ Sonia’s father thumped Karim on the shoulder. ‘But everyone’s going to say I just paid off the police. Never mind. Memories are short in this part of town. Throw a few parties and everyone forgets your crimes. At least, everyone who’s invited does.’ He grinned at me.

‘You aren’t guilty of any crimes, Aboo,’ Sonia said softly. ‘Ama, you look exhausted. Go to sleep.’ I hadn’t even noticed her mother enter the room. No one ever did.

‘Everyone’s guilty of crimes,’ Sonia’s father said. ‘Just not always the ones you’re accused of.’

‘And what are your crimes?’ I asked.

I saw Karim glare at me, but I thought, let all truths ring out tonight. Enough secrecy and innuendo.

Sonia’s father gestured around him. ‘Look at this place. Look at where I live. Look at all I had to leave behind to be here. That’s my crime. I left so much behind.’

‘You did it for us,’ Sonia said, in the manner of a second-rate actress who has played a climactic scene so often she can’t remember how to inject that quality of revelation into her voice. ‘For Sohail and me.’

Her father kissed her forehead. ‘Yes. I thought you’d be better off in this world. There was a time when I had certainty.’ He put an arm around Karim’s shoulder; he’d always been fond of Karim. ‘Now that I don’t have this on my mind, I’ll sort out something for your car-thief friend.’

When had he told Sonia’s father about the car thief? Had he been to visit Sonia at some point without telling me? How could anyone look at Sonia and not want to drown forever in her serene beauty? How could anyone look at Sonia and not see how easy it was to love her? I put my arms around her shoulders and kissed the side of her head. Karim looked surprised at that. Did he think I wasn’t capable of a single genuine emotion? Did he expect me to say, ‘Pity you won’t be marrying Adel Rana. He would have purified your nouveau riche blood line.’

God, Aba, how could you have?

Dost Mohommad entered the room, with a tray bearing cups of green tea with mint and cardamom. Karim, Sonia and I each took a cup, and went outside. We sat in the garden, forgoing cane chairs for the sprawl of grass, and Sonia raised her cup. ‘To the grey areas of our lives,’ she said. ‘To the slippery slopes, and the absence of signposts.’

What had she begun to suspect about her father?

Karim clinked cups with her and waved away swooping, bewinged insects. ‘Raheen has something to tell you.’

I told her about the newspaper announcement.

She listened, without interrupting, as I spoke, and then laid a hand on my arm. ‘Thank you. I’d rather hear it from you than anyone in the whole wide…’ She closed her eyes, and looked away.

I held my cup against her cold cheek, and understood Zia’s inclination to beat Adel Rana senseless. She didn’t look at me, fidgeting instead with a long fleshy leaf that sprouted from a calla lilly bulb. She wrapped the leaf around her fisted hand and the leaf snapped, just centimetres above the bulb.

I took the leaf out of her hand and knotted it around her neck. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, and wondered: how had we come to this, all four of us? How had the laughter gone out of our lives?

Karim stood up and walked around the garden, running his palms over the outline of flowers and shrubs. I closed my eyes for a long moment. When I looked again, he was out of the radius of the veranda light, transformed into shadow. When a moth veered past his shoulder I was almost surprised it didn’t flit right through his dark form.

Sonia raised her head from my shoulder, and looked from me to Karim.

‘I’m going in to tell my parents what’s happened. Karim, you and Raheen wait for me.’

She went back inside, and Karim continued staring intently at a cluster of flowers, with more fascination than was necessary for what was just a pink clump of petals trying hard to assert resemblance to a rose. I lay back and tried to find something to focus all my attention on, but my mind simply would not clear of everything whirling around in it. It seemed so easy to curl up in a ball on the grass and never think of anyone or anything again.

At length, Sonia came back outside. ‘Zia just rang. Sounded strange. He said he had to see me. Do you know what this is about?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, he’s driving aimlessly. Refused to come here. And I don’t want to go anywhere we’re likely to run into people we know. So I said the two of you would drive me to Kharadar to meet him. That’s OK, isn’t it?’

I looked at my watch. ‘Your father won’t let you leave the house at this hour. Why Kharadar? I’ve only ever driven through there on the way to the beach.’

‘My father’s feeling too bad about my broken engagement to say no to anything I ask. And you’ve answered “why Kharadar?” Because no one we know goes there.’

And so, for the second time in the day, I drove over Mai Kolachi, the road that cut through mangrove swamps. A few minutes later we were on I.I. Chundrigar Road, just past the Jubilee Insurance House, which, in the dark with some of its illuminated letters fused, spelt out the suggestive command: jubile in ra house.

‘Oh, I always Jubile in Raheen’s house. Don’t you?’ Sonia said, turning to smile at me. I rolled my eyes and then smiled back. It was the only thing she’d said since we’d left her house. It was the only thing anyone had said. Zia’s car streaked past us on I.I., and then reversed back when he realized it was my car he’d overtaken. Karim opened the door without a word and stepped into Zia’s car.

‘What’s happened with the two of you?’ Sonia said, but she didn’t need my pain to add to hers, so I told her ‘nothing serious’.

‘You’ll tell me when you’re ready,’ Sonia said, and touched my cheek, almost crumbling my resolve.

Before long we were in narrow gullies. Zia pulled alongside and asked Sonia if she could find her way around here.

‘Is the map man lost?’ Sonia said, smiling in at Karim.

Karim smiled back and said he’d never seen a map of Kharadar and no one he knew could verbally re-create its twists and turns. I knew nothing about Kharadar as it existed in the present, although somewhere in my head was the information that when Karachi was little more than a cluster of huts within a boundary wall surrounded by marshy ground, there were two points of entry to the town: Kharadar (the salt doorway) and Mithadar (the sweet doorway), named after the quality of water in the wells that stood by each door. So this was as Old Karachi as it got.

Sonia directed me through the narrow lanes, with Zia following behind. She was the only one among us not surprised to see that the shops were still open and the streets bustling with activity, though it was near midnight and most of Karachi had shut down for the night.

A woman was buying a plush animal from a shop that had dozens of toys, individually stored in plastic bags, hanging from hooks outside the store, forcing people walking along the narrow pavement to duck and weave out of the way of footballs, teddy bears, dolls and plastic cricket bats. Through the open door of a travel agency I saw a group of men sitting in a ragged circle with their feet up on a table; further ahead, a sheep poked its nose through the door that stood ajar to a video-game arcade, if arcade is not too elaborate a term for a tiny enclosure with space for only three games. A crowd of children stood around a man who fed long, yellowy sugar cane into a press on a rickety cart and filled old Coca-Cola and 7-Up bottles with sweet liquid. Piles of flattened canes were stacked on the road beside him.

I was moved, absurdly, to tears. A week or two ago people were wary of leaving their houses, particularly after dark, the violence in the city both unpredictable and terrifyingly ordered, causing some to speculate that the factional violence, ethnic violence, sectarian violence and random violence were not unconnected but fuelled by someone who wanted Karachi terrorized. But who? Why? No one was sure, though there was no shortage of theories. We all knew it would start up again – the shootings on a massive scale, the unnatural silence in the evenings, the siege mentality – but for the moment, for today, Karachi was getting back to its feet, as it had always been able to do, and that didn’t just mean getting back to work, but getting back to play: friendship, chai, cricket on the street, conversation. It was a terribly self-involved thought, I knew, but I couldn’t help feeling that, in the midst of everything that was happening, Karachi had decided to turn around and wink at me. And in that wink was serious intent: yes, the city said, I am a breeding ground for monsters, but don’t think that is the full measure of what I am.

Sonia told me to pull over next to a paan shop; Zia parked next to me, and we walked together to a chai shop. There didn’t appear to be any female customers, but no one gave us a second glance. The interior of the chai shop – confusingly called a ‘hotel’—was fitted with white bathroom tiles and fluorescent lights, as was the norm with such establishments, and our collective aesthetic gave one long shudder and sat us down outdoors, on wooden backless benches around a laminated-top long table, with watery imprints of the bottoms of glasses on it. The owner (at least, he appeared to be the owner because he had a note pad and pencil in hand) snapped his fingers and a man in black shalwar-kameez appeared to wipe the table clean. When he was done, Karim, Sonia and I rested our elbows on the table top, though Zia first removed a handkerchief from his pocket and spread that on the table in front of him. When he saw we were about to laugh he whisked the handkerchief away, and planted his palms on the table with an air of nonchalance. Sonia ordered parathas and four cups of tea ‘with malai’; Zia interrupted, ‘No malai for me.’ He couldn’t bear even the tiniest speck of cream to mix with the milk in his tea.