Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

A beggar girl came and stood by our table with a cupped palm extended towards us.

‘Move away,’ Zia said.

She stood her ground.

‘Are you deaf? Move away. Can’t we drink tea in peace?’

‘Zia!’ Karim remonstrated.

‘Fine,’ Zia said. He pointed at Karim. ‘He’s the one with the money.’

The girl turned to Karim. Sonia nudged him and pointed out the other beggars who were watching with interest to see if he was a soft touch. ‘Come back when we’ve finished,’ he said. The girl continued to stand her ground, blocking Karim’s view of the street. I couldn’t help getting some perverse pleasure from watching him so torn between the moral code that served him so well in the abstract and the terrible irritation of having someone standing so close, pushing her outstretched palm in front of him and mumbling, without conviction, phrases about her sick mother and sick brother and no money for medicine. These were the sort of things he could remain blithely unaware of when he sat in London or Boston, shaking his head in disgust at the tiny circles in which I lived my life.

‘We’re clearly the rich kids around here,’ I said. ‘She’d be a disgrace to her profession if she gave up on you so easily. Guess no one’s ever shown her a map that lets her know her connectedness to you. Guess she isn’t aware of your great, bleeding heart that sees your life in the context of her world.’

‘Sonia, would you tell your friend to stop directing every conversation back to herself,’ Karim said.

‘What’s going on?’ Sonia said. Neither Karim nor I answered, and Zia seemed to be in another world.

The waiter came back to our table, shooing the girl away, and set down four pieces of paper as place mats. They were shipping schedules, detailing lists of Ships, Ports of Call, ETA and ETD, Voyage Number, Flag, Agents and other indecipherables such as: Line Advert, Service, Terminal and EGM. The last column was To Load For (‘sort of like “to die for” but less intense’, Karim said, and I couldn’t believe how much I wanted to laugh at that) and there were a wealth of place names: Riga, Ashkabad, Fos, Beira, Abidjan, Leixoes, Thessalaniki, Stavanger, Limassol, Monrovia, Lomé, Mouakchott, Port Gentile. I’d never before given thought to what it meant to be part of a port city, to leave the imprint of a tea-wet spoon on names of places that preferred coffee, to have these strange and foreign syllables intrinsically involved in the commerce of the place, to look at the man two tables from you and wonder if, for all his lack of external signs of affluence, he knew the word for ‘ocean’ in thirty different languages or the taste of fish cooked in a hundred different spices, and knew too, despite all his travelling, that home meant this alley and these place mats and those different dialects swirling around him. But to admit any of that out loud would be tantamount to saying Karim had a point about me, and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

The parathas arrived, as did the tea, and I gulped when I saw it. The cream rose entire centimetres above the rim of the cup, more frothy than any cappuccino I’d ever seen, and as we watched it in awe it wobbled. ‘The thing’s alive,’ I said.

Sonia, scooping it up with a spoon, smiled at me and said, ‘What were you expecting? A dribble of single cream?’ I continued to stare at the cup and she said, ‘If you eat it up really fast like ice cream on a hot day with the car window open and wind whooshing through, you might get to the tea beneath; but if you leave it it’ll just go on absorbing tea and expanding, expanding.’

Of course it was delicious, once I summoned up the courage to put it in my mouth. But Karim gave up after only a couple of spoons. Too rich, too sweet. If I’d been a little more convinced of my ability to finish the cup of tea-flavoured cream I’d have mocked his fragile foreign stomach.

The beggar girl returned and held out her palm again. Zia raised his hand threateningly. ‘Go away!’

‘Zia!’ Even I was shocked by the violence in his voice.

Zia bit his lip. ‘I hate them. Those beggars. All of them. Particularly the deformed ones.’ He started tearing the place mat into little strips. ‘I had this ayah when I was a kid. She said I should never trust strangers, because Karachi is full of people in the employ of the beggar master, and they kidnap children and lop off their limbs so that they can be effective beggars, pulling the heartstrings of passers-by.’

‘We all heard variants of that,’ I said. ‘Why are you the only one who’s traumatized by it?’

‘I became convinced that my brother hadn’t died, but was kidnapped and no one wanted to tell me that.’

‘So you used to see these young beggars and think one of them might be your brother and no one would know it?’ Sonia said.

Zia shook his head. ‘I used to be terrified that one of them was my brother, and my parents would recognize him, so they’d take him home with us and then I’d have to share my room with this maimed, emaciated creature.’

Karim and I couldn’t help but look at each other, for the first time without rancour that evening, neither of us able to think of any response to this statement, both of us confirming with each other the horror of what Zia had just said.

Sonia spoke up. ‘Zia, I’m sure, I mean…he would have put on weight.’

It was the silliest thing anyone could have said. It was the only thing anyone could have said to make Zia smile. He reached forward as if to put his hand on hers, but drew back before making any kind of contact, and gestured to the beggar girl, who came forward hesitantly.

Zia took his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a hundred-rupee note. The girl’s eyes widened. ‘If you stay away from us, and keep everyone else away from us until we leave, I’ll give you this money after I’ve paid the hill,’ Zia said. I’m not sure she believed him, but his tone of voice didn’t leave room for any bargaining. The girl moved a few feet away.

‘So why are we here?’ I said.

Zia took a cigarette and a box of matches out of his pocket. He put the cigarette in his mouth and tried to light a match, but only snapped the matchstick in two. When he took out another match and struck it against the side of the box, there was a sound of friction – flint against flint – but no flame appeared. Karim borrowed a lighter from the man at the next table, and lit Zia’s cigarette for him.

‘Storytime,’ Zia said. ‘Let me tell you a story. True story. Once upon a time, it wasn’t a stray bullet that killed my brother.’

My head jerked up.

‘No, Raheen, don’t interrupt. No one interrupt. There was a man who lived next door to us, a powerful man, one of those men who’s in favour with every government. He and my father were friends, not close friends but friends enough that the man invited my parents to go, with my brother, to his beach hut one weekend. At the beach, only a handful of people there, the man pulled out a gun – he had a collection – and started shooting, no reason, just to impress some of the young kids, fishermen’s children, who had heard that a government official with a new gun just bought from…I don’t know where, this was before Afghanistan…but they heard, from the driver or someone, that there was this really cool gun around. So, this guy, he thinks he’ll give them a bit of a thrill: he starts firing in the direction of the sea. My father tells him to stop because those are real bullets after all, and what if someone’s swimming there whom they can’t see? So the guy says, OK, I’ll stop after one grand finale. See that sand castle? Bet I could shoot a hole straight through that flag on top, anyone want to lay bets, and my father says no but the guy’s brother says yes and the guy shoots and loses the bet. It was a huge sand castle, really immense. Large enough that if you stood at a distance, at a certain angle, you couldn’t see my mother and her one-year-old son making sand turtles and mudpies on the other side of the castle.’

I shivered and, reaching beneath the table, found Karim’s hand reaching for mine. We both gripped hard, my thumb pressing down on the indentation between his knuckles. The smell of salt in the air was overpowering. I held my nose closed and breathed through my mouth.

‘My father knew it would be pointless to press charges, because of the other man’s position. Pointless to press charges and pointless to weep. Yes, no point to tears. My father is a man who believes in every action having a point. So he swore he’d build himself a list of contacts so long, so powerful, that he would never again feel helpless before another man’s clout. And if he ever had another son, his son would not suffer at the hands of anyone, not if my father could help it. No one, no one, would make his son suffer.’

Fathers, again. I released Karim’s hand just as he released mine. Poor, messed-up Zia, who at fourteen could have looked up secret files on every grown-up he knew in Karachi and read about all their flaws and none of their redeeming qualities. Poor Zia, his house always full of people worth cultivating, rather than people worth having in your home. Poor, poor Zia, whose father tried to give him everything and, in so doing, turned him into a boy with whom Sonia could never contemplate being more than friends. As soon as I thought that, I knew.

Zia saw the change that came over my face, and nodded. But Sonia and Karim were still looking at him in pity and bewilderment, forcing him to spell it out.

‘I yelled at him, Sonia. When I heard you were engaged. I asked him what could he do now, after he’d always sworn I could have anything I wanted…what could he do about…’

Sonia flushed, and looked down, seeing the declaration of his feelings towards her, but seeing nothing beyond it.

‘But he proved me wrong. Dad to the rescue. He did something about it, didn’t he? Of course the Ranas wouldn’t let their son marry the daughter of an accused drug smuggler.’

Tears started rolling down Sonia’s face.

‘Helps to have friends in positions of power. Helps a great deal. Accuse and acquit at will. No need for a court of law. Dear Dad. He’s got it all figured out. Was almost too efficient. Got two separate agencies involved. Bit of confusion, but in the end they did the trick. And once the engagement broke off, all charges dropped. No harm done, right? No harm.’

‘At the airport. What they did to me…’ Sonia buried her face in her hands.

Dear God, dear God, take me away from this place.

‘He swears he didn’t know. He swears he told them not to hurt you.’ Zia started raking the skin of the back of his hands with his fingernails. ‘I’m sorry, Sonia. I’m so sorry. Please, look at me. Sonia, please.’

But she kept her head buried in her hands.

All of us. Everyone who’s been here long enough. My father, yes. And my mother, who went ahead and married him despite that. And Zia’s father. And Sonia’s father, who – I don’t care how manufactured the evidence this time round – was certainly guilty of something even if I didn’t know what. Aunty Runty, once the sweetest, most light-hearted woman. Uncle Bunty, who borrowed money from Sonia’s father but didn’t spare a breath to defend him or commiserate when he was arrested. The list went on. Every one of my parents’ friends, every one of my friends’ parents, guilty. And we were no longer young enough simply to watch from the sidelines. How could any of us face up to the truth, and stay?

I put my arm around Sonia, wanting only to erase all the misery that her bent head and sagging shoulders conveyed. ‘At least it’s over now. And you don’t want to marry someone who’s so fickle. There’ll be others, tons of proposals, all better than Adel Rana.’

She pulled away from me. ‘It’s not over. Things like this are never over.’

Karim stood up, pushing back the wooden bench. ‘I can’t stay here. I don’t understand this place. I don’t want to.’ He looked at me sadly, almost apologetically. He turned to Sonia. ‘I’m going to fly out tomorrow. But I want your permission to see your father first, Sonia.’

‘My father?’

‘Her father?’

‘Karimazov, don’t do this.’

‘I’d like to ask his permission to marry you.’

A boy selling balloons moved towards us. The beggar girl knocked him to the ground. One balloon burst; another slipped out of his grasp and flew up, a white oval against the moon-empty sky. Karim and Zia rushed to separate the beggar and boy. I stayed seated on the wooden bench, and watched the balloon. It rose higher and higher and disappeared into a constellation.

‘What’s going on?’ Sonia said. ‘Will someone tell me what’s going on?’

I could see Karim turning to say something to Zia, and Zia shaking his arm off. Sonia was saying, ‘I thought you and Karim…’ and I wanted to yell at her, ‘He wants perfection, so he’s choosing you.’

That was when it hit me for the first time: I had lost him.

Not to Sonia and not to maps. I had lost him to the past, and there was no changing that. Mine was still the hand he reached for under the table when the world turned awful, but that only made the loss more unbearable. It was as though our instincts to turn to each other, to want each other, remained as strong as ever, but when instinct stopped and thought took over we pulled away, each time with a little more disgust than the time before.

‘Are you angry with me?’ Sonia asked. ‘I’m not going to marry him, you know that, don’t you? He’s yours, even if both of you don’t see it.’

‘You’re a better woman than I am, Sonia. You’re a better woman than my mother was.’

Karim and Zia had finally stopped the beggar girl and the balloon boy from striking out at each other. They started to walk towards us.

‘I don’t want to talk to Zia,’ Sonia said.

‘I don’t want to talk to Karim.’

We turned, ran towards my car, despite the stares and exclamations of the men around us, and drove off. In my rear-view mirror I saw the boys watch us go. Neither of them attempted to stop us.

. .

There are two kinds of blessed moments to which we can awake: the first, that moment of realizing a nightmare was unhinged from reality, no place in our lives for it save for those places in which we store memories that make us shudder even though they aren’t true memories at all; the second, more elusive – for we don’t fully recognize the peace of mind it brings until it’s gone – is the moment of believing reality was a nightmare, nothing more. But the morning after Kharadar, covered in sweat despite the December breeze, I awoke to memory.

I looked at the clock. Early. Forty-eight hours ago, at this time, I was standing at the airport, waiting for Karim. I picked myself off the mattress quietly so as not to disturb Sonia, who was fast asleep in bed, just inches away from me.

I brushed my teeth using my finger as a toothbrush and changed from Sonia’s T-shirt back into the clothes I had been wearing the night before. They were stiff with sea salt. I took them off again, and borrowed a shalwar-kameez from Sonia’s wardrobe. I was unable to imagine how I would make my way through the coming day. Karim was leaving in a few hours. He had called Sonia’s house last night to say he had used Uncle Asif’s contacts at PIA to get himself a seat on today’s flight to London. While he was speaking, Sonia had tried to hand the phone to me, but I refused to take it. He had clearly said something to her about coming to see her father, and Sonia said, ‘Please, don’t. Our friendship will be over if you do.’

Sonia and I spent the rest of the night watching tear-jerkers: Beaches, Dead Poets Society, The Outsiders, a tissue box placed between us.

‘C. Thomas Howell,’ Sonia said, pointing at the screen as the credits rolled for The Outsiders. ‘He must have thought he was going to be such a big star. What happened to him?’

‘Playing Ponyboy was the zenith of his career,’ I replied, and then we both had to laugh at how much that made us cry.

Halfway through Beaches, my mother had called looking for me. Sonia said I’d be spending the night at her place. She was too embarrassed to say I refused to talk to my mother so she told her I was already asleep.

I pushed the mattress under Sonia’s bed and sat down at her desk. Now what? At some point I’d have to go home. What happens when you spend your life creating yourself in someone else’s image and that image festers overnight? How can you point a finger without it turning right round and stabbing you in the throat? I pressed a fingernail against my gullet, ran to the bathroom and threw up all the chai and paratha and sandwiches and pakoras from the evening before.

Afterwards I lay on the bathroom tiles, concentrating on the expansion and deflation of my chest cavity as I breathed in and out. At length, I reached over for Sonia’s make-up basket, took out her eyeliner, tore a length of loo paper off a roll and wrote:

(1) Why did Zafar make that remark about Bengalis?

(2) Why did Yasmin and Ali’s engagement break off?

(3) How did they all remain friends?

(4) Who felt what for whom, and when?

I tore off another square and wrote:

(1) What does 1971 have to do with now?

The blank whiteness of the loo paper below that question faced me like an accusation. I pressed the nib of the eyeliner against the paper, and a tiny prick of black spread into a wider and wider circle. I pulled the entire roll of paper off its holder, placed a magazine beneath it, and wrote:

Days away from 1995, we are nearly forty-eight years old as a nation, young enough that there are people alive who have lived through our entire history and more, but too old to put our worries down to teething problems. Between our birth in 1947 and 1995, dead bang between our beginning and our present, is 1971, of which I know next to nothing except that there was a war and East Pakistan became Bangladesh, and what terrible things we must have done then to remain so silent about it. Is it shame at losing the war, or guilt about what we did to try to win that mutes us?

I put the eyeliner down, looked at the furious scribbling, much of which had torn through the paper and left black squiggles on the Prime Minister’s face. Time to find my father.

When I walked into our house, he was pacing the hallway. He clearly hadn’t slept all night. I didn’t know what I was feeling as we looked at each other, but it wasn’t anything I’d ever felt before.

‘Come on,’ he said to me.

I followed him outside, but when he got into his car, I hesitated.

‘We’re going for a drive,’ he said.

‘I think I might feel claustrophobic.’

‘So open the window.’

‘I don’t really think you’re in a position to tell me what to do.’

He started the engine without responding to that.

I opened the gate so that he could drive out. Our street was just beginning to awaken. The retired army officer down the road was taking his two German Shepherd dogs for a walk; the jamadaar was hosing down the driveway next door, sending bougainvillaea flowers flowing under the gate and on to the street in rivulets of oily water; the newspaperwallah was driving slowly along on his motorbike, tossing papers into houses – but on arriving at the house of the American chairman of some multinational, he had to veer his bike all the way to one side of the street in order to achieve a trajectory that would allow the paper to clear the absurdly high wall. When he reached the house next door, the paperwallah wavered, conscious of the wet driveway; then, seeing me looking at him, he smiled a huge smile and tossed the paper over the wall. The jamadaar stormed out, waving the wet newspaper over his head, and demanding a dry copy. The paperwallah said, ‘Blow on it, it’ll dry. If you can water a driveway, you can do that,’ and zipped down the street on his motorbike.

Aba reversed out of the gate, and I got into the car. He drove towards Clifton, past the shrine of the Sufi, Shah Abdullah Ghazi, with its surrounding world of pavement fortune-tellers and heroin addicts and shops selling flower garlands, then up the incline from where we could see Mohatta Palace, that decaying pink building which, with its domes and its history and its amalgamation of British, Middle Eastern, Hindu and Mughal styles, had always been my favourite of Karachi’s structures. Aba steered his car away from the palace and parked in the large circle overlooking Funland and a green field and, further out, the sea. I followed him down the graffiti-covered steps leading from the circle to the field, and we stopped just before the steps gave way to a stone walkway with carved archways cut into its underside, which ended in a covered stone structure, open on all four sides.

‘The Lady Lloyd Pier,’ he said, gesturing at the structure. ‘That’s where I proposed to your mother. It stood in the waves once.’

We walked along the stone approach to the pier, a sea of grass and polythene bags around us. The Ferris wheel and Pirate Ship and other Funland rides were motionless to our left, the white minaret of a mosque cleft the air between the pier and the sea wall in front of us, and the rock shaped like man metamorphosing out of stone rose from the water on the other side of the sea wall. The transparent polythene bags looked like balloons where inflated, sleeping giant jellyfish where not. It hits you in unexpected moments, this city’s romance; everywhere, air pockets of loveliness just when your lungs can’t take any more congestion or pollution or stifling newspaper headlines. A pier in the middle of a field that was clearly used on occasion as a rubbish dump should have been absurd, or sad, but instead was suggestive of both constancy and change.

I’ll take constancy. Keep the change.

The rumble of buses behind us sounded as the ocean might sound to someone who had only heard it in imagination. The early morning sea not yet woken up to full colour.

I turned to Aba. ‘Karim wants to marry Sonia.’

Aba tilted his head to one side. ‘Marry! I still think of you as kids. Karim and Sonia? I didn’t realize there was…well, to be honest I thought you and he…’

I looked away, rubbing my thumb in the pockmarked stone between my father and me. ‘I thought so, too.’

‘Oh God. Is it because of me…?’

I nodded. I wanted to hit him and hug him all at once. He didn’t say anything, and I imagined him thinking back to that day, nearly a quarter of a century ago, when he proposed to my mother. All I knew about the proposal was that when he popped the question she replied, ‘Zaf, yesterday when I told you to give me a ring, I meant a phone call.’ I had always thought of their courtship as being rife with humour.

‘If I had told you earlier what I said to Shafiq, how would that have changed things with you and Karim?’

I raised my hands and dropped them, unable to answer. It would have changed everything. It would have changed nothing.

‘People have always said how much I’m like you.’ I stood up and put my arms around the stone pillar. ‘I thought I knew what that meant. I thought I was your distilled self. Raheen’s like a younger, female version of Zafar, but slightly less charming, slightly less intelligent, slightly less prone to singing tunelessly.’ We both smiled at that. The same smile, mouth going up at one corner, head tilting forward slightly, something slightly sardonic about our eyebrows. ‘Slightly less capable of putting aside all biases and prejudices for the sake of justice.’

‘Is that how you see me?’ He couldn’t keep the pleasure from his voice. ‘Champion of justice?’

‘It was.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t know now. Something’s changed, something’s changed horribly, and I don’t even know what it is. But I know this. We are alike. We are alike in this: we don’t deserve the people who love us.’

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ He stood up and started to come towards me.

‘I’ll hit you. If you try and touch me, I’ll hit you. I swear I will.’

Neither he nor I were prepared for the ferocity of my reaction. We both looked away from each other, tears running down our cheeks.

‘What do you want me to say?’ His voice was unrecognizable. ‘If I knew what to say I’d have said it long ago. There was a moment when I thought that by the time you were old enough to know, I’d be old enough to know what to tell you. But what can I say?’

‘Tell me why. Why did you say that to Shafiq?’

He looked at the sea, at the field, at the ships on the horizon.

‘I swear to you, I don’t know.’ He clenched his hands. ‘I don’t think I even knew at the moment I said it. Raheen, how could I have said it? After everything we’d just lived through, after everything that she’d had to bear.’ He leaned his face against a pillar and, as I watched his shoulders shake, a thought sprang to mind so hideous that I cried out loud.

He looked up at me.

‘You’ve brought me up to forgive you, haven’t you?’ I backed away from him. ‘Everything you’ve ever taught me about how to live my life. “Condemnation is an act of smugness… How can you blame a person unless you’ve slipped into their soul, seen the serpents and abysses that lie there?…Shouldn’t we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today?” Everything I thought was so damn noble of you, it was just a self-serving attempt to turn me into someone who would forgive you when this moment came.’

‘Raheen, that’s not true.’

‘And when it came to ethnic politics, weren’t you the great man? Never attacking anyone else, but also standing firm on your position, saying it wasn’t ethnicity that mattered per se but questions of injustice. Zafar the Just. And what was that all about? So you could say to me, look at my track record, Raheen; see how I’ve evolved?’

‘You’re getting it all wrong. I wanted you to grow up to be someone who would never do what I did. I wanted you to be better than I am.’ He reached for me, and I pushed him away, slamming him against a corner of the brick column. He choked in pain.

‘If that’s what you wanted you wouldn’t have made it so easy for me to love you. You’ve destroyed our relationship; maybe I could forgive you that. But you’ve destroyed whatever hope Karim and I had together, and that, Aba, I will hold against you well past the day you die.’

I wrenched the keys from his hand and ran, faster than I had run with Sonia to get away from Karim. But Aba was following. Calling my name and running, his feet echoing in time with mine. Did I even have to run like he did? Men walking down the stairs saw us and called out to me as I drew near them, ‘Is he bothering you? Should we stop him?’

‘No,’ I said, hearing his steps falter as age caught up with him. ‘Get him a taxi.’

. .

‘Oh, here you are. I’ve just been looking for you.’ Zia strode into his den later that morning, holding aloft a large quiche. ‘You been here long?’

I shook my head and turned down Billie Holiday. ‘Been driving aimlessly for a while. I needed a place of refuge.’

‘So it would be stupid of me to ask if things are OK at home, since you obviously haven’t been there since last night.’ When I looked questioning he pointed to my clothes. ‘Those are Soma’s,’ he said. ‘You don’t own anything with full-length sleeves.’

‘Well done, Sherlock. You’re not entirely right, though. I walked through my front door this morning. Then walked back out. Don’t plan to return in any hurry. Basically, I’m avoiding my mother and not speaking to my father. Why are you carrying a quiche?’

‘You have to admit, I win the contest for unspeakable fathers.’ He twirled the quiche dish on his fingertips. ‘We always acted like Sonia was the one who had got unlucky when fathers were handed out, but you know what?’

‘Yeah. Your father’s some kind of Mafia don, and my father’s just a few steps away from being an advocate of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, Sonia’s father might not even be a drug smuggler for all we know. Why are you carrying a quiche?’

‘Right. I mean, he could be an arms dealer.’ Zia grinned, and placed the quiche next to me. ‘I just felt like picking it up from the Club bakery on my way back from dropping Karim at the airport. But I hate quiche. So you can have it.’

‘Such a gent.’

Zia sat on the floor next to the black leather sofa on which I was reclining, resting his head against the sofa arm. ‘You doing OK?’ he said.

‘No. You?’

‘Not even close.’

I laid my hand on the top of his head. ‘It’s not your fault, Zia. You didn’t know what he was going to do.’

‘Doesn’t stop me being partly responsible.’ He pressed the CD remote control and Billie became Paul Simon. We listened in silence for a while until Paul started repeating I don’t want no part of this crazy love/I don’t want no part of your love again and again. I looked at Zia; he seemed oblivious to the lyrics, and to me, as he sat blowing smoke rings in the air, his expression mired in concentration. I prised the remote out of his hand and switched off the music.

Zia looked up at me. ‘Raheen, I want you to do something for me. I’ve been thinking about this since last night. I want you to call Sonia and tell her you’ll be perfectly happy if she marries Karim.’

‘That’s not funny, Zia.’

Zia got up and walked over to the bar. ‘Nothing about this is funny.’

‘You are not having a drink at this hour. Put that down.’

Zia set the Black Label back on the bar and lit up another cigarette. ‘Rumours stick. No good family will want their son marrying her. Not after everyone who knows her father said “I told you so” when he was arrested. Not after she’s been so publicly humiliated by those pillars of society, the Ranas. No, the only proposals she’ll get now will be from money-grabbing scum. If she means anything to me, I can’t let her marry anyone like that. I can’t. She breaks my heart if she gets a splinter in her finger; how could I bear to see…’ He shook his head. ‘Far better she marry Karim.’

I walked over to the bar. ‘Or you.’

Zia cradled the Black Label to him. ‘It’ll never happen. Even if I thought she’d agree, which I know she won’t, I’ll never do something that would allow my father to think his way of fixing things works. Please, Raheen. Be as true a friend as I know you can be. Let Karim go. You’ve lost him already, you know that. You lost him before any of us were born, back in 1971. Now let him go. It’s not as though you believe they won’t be happy together.’