Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

He was being serious. If a gold sign with flashing light bulbs had appeared in front of me with the words here is your chance at redemption I don’t think I would have been very surprised. I brushed Zia’s hair off his forehead. I would not have thought him capable of such an act of love. In some way I had always been slightly condescending about his feelings for Sonia. I thought those feelings had a lot of breadth, but little depth. I think I liked seeing Zia as somewhat shallow; the party guy, the spoilt boy. I liked the absence of startling contrast when I stood next to him. Well, no more. I looked at Zia’s framed photograph of Sonia, Karim, himself and me. Remarkable people, my friends. But did he really think he could see her with Karim and not resent them both, even if they were happy, particularly if they were happy? Perhaps resentment was a price he was willing to pay.

I slid off the bar stool. ‘Zee, I have to go and talk to someone. I’ll be back soon.’

He nodded, and as I turned to go he tugged my sleeve. ‘Is love stronger when it lets go or when it holds on?’

I went to ask my mother.

I knew she hadn’t gone to the office that morning, but was at Karachi’s premier art gallery instead, interviewing Aunty Laila about her upcoming sculpture exhibit. The two of them were the only people at the gallery when I got there a few minutes later. I opened the door to hear Aunty Laila talking on the phone to someone at a plant nursery about getting a poinsettia to decorate her hallway for the party she was having that night. Aunty Laila was horrified to hear the price of the plant and said to the nurseryman, ‘That’s very expensive. I only want it for one night. Who’s going to pay that much for a plant for one night? Can’t I just borrow it for a few hours?’ I rolled my eyes, but it seemed that the nurseryman agreed, because there was Aunty Laila saying, ‘Oh, wonderful, but you don’t really need it back in the morning, do you? Early afternoon all right instead? I’m very tired the morning after parties. You know how it is… Good… Well, I think we’ll have to discuss what you mean by “in case of damages” when I come to pick it up. Surely you’re not going to take an inventory of every leaf and check it for signs of discoloration the next morning?…I don’t believe it…I don’t believe it… Really? Who else?…No!…No!… No!… Well, I assure you I don’t invite that sort of guest to my parties.’

She hung up and turned to my mother. ‘You will not believe what he just told me certain politicians have been known to do to plants. Yick! Oh, sorry, sweetheart, you’re really not in the mood for gossip, are you?’ She looked up and saw me before my mother did. ‘Oh. I’ll just go and get something from downstairs.’ She walked past me towards the door, stopping on her way to put her hand on my cheek. ‘Darling, if you hold everyone accountable for what they said and did in ’71 hardly anyone escapes whipping.’

The comfort of collective guilt.

I kicked off my shoes and walked across the cool beige floor towards my mother. She was standing at the far end of the gallery, looking down at the street below. I stood next to her, crossed my arms and leaned forward, pressing my forehead against the window. My breath misted an O in the glass.

There was a street sign right below the window and I pointed to it and said, ‘So this is Khayaban-e-Jami.’

‘What?’

‘We always just refer to it as the road from Schon Circle to the submarine roundabout. Why is there a submarine in the middle of a roundabout?’

‘When they first put it up Bunty said it was so that the Rangers and the army guys could hide inside and shoot out of the window thingies during showdowns between the law-enforcement agencies and political activists. But we all said he was being absurd. When do shoot-outs happen in our part of town? And why are we talking about streets and landmarks?’

I laughed shortly. A foot-high bronze man, poised to dive, stood at the edge of the desk beside me. I ran my thumb along his shoulder blades and wrapped my hand around his chest. ‘How much did she love him? Aunty Maheen. How much did she love Aba when they were engaged?’

Ami looked me straight in the eyes. If she’d said love wasn’t quantifiable, I might have stormed out of there. But she said, ‘Very much. Very, very much.’

‘That makes you pretty despicable, doesn’t it?’

She drew herself up to her full height. A tall woman, my mother, and capable of great regality. ‘I will not apologize for marrying your father.’ She made a tiny self-deprecating sound. ‘Would it help you if I said I loved him first? And that as long as I thought he and Maheen had a chance I never made one move towards him?’

‘But didn’t you think about what you were doing to her? You were her best friend, Ami, and you married the man who broke her heart.’

‘I loved him more than her. Yes. I don’t deny it. I’m not going to make this easy for you, Raheen. Your father may want to play the martyr and say, “Come, hate me, I deserve it,” but I will show you so many shades of grey about this business it’ll make your head spin.’

I backed away. ‘God, you’d make a good tyrant.’

‘I’m a mother. The boundary between the two is sometimes very blurry.’

I started to smile, but forced myself to stop. ‘How could you want to spend your life with someone who said a thing like that?’

A tiny furrow of concentration appeared on her forehead, as though she were trying to remember something she hadn’t thought about in a very long time. ‘I didn’t believe he meant it.’

‘Oh, so it’s that simple.’

‘There was nothing simple about any of it.’ She gazed out of the window again, then looked at me as though sizing me up. ‘He only had one major fault, your father, when we were all young. One flaw. He lacked strength. But somewhere along the way he found it, and to this day I don’t know if he found it when he was engaged to Maheen or just after. No, Raheen, I don’t know why he said what he said, but I know that after he did it he was able to look the country straight in the eye. Until then he’d been looking from a height, a position of remove, and suddenly he was down there – or thought he was – with the rabid crowd, saying the kinds of things that came out of their mouths, believing that a part of him may have believed what he was saying, though I can tell you he didn’t.’

‘Or at least that’s what you need to believe to justify marrying him.’ I couldn’t stop myself saying it, though I had already lost Aba and Karim and I didn’t know how I could bear another loss. But Ami and I had always spoken straight to each other; maybe, just maybe, that would be enough to save us. I could have shown her Karim’s last letter to me, all those years ago; I almost did, except I didn’t know how to tell her not to tell Aba about it.

‘If you choose to believe that, I can’t dissuade you.’

I waited for her to continue, but she didn’t. She gave me this look as though to say, you decide what questions you need to ask.

‘What do you mean, he looked the country straight in the eye?’

‘I mean, he didn’t pretend it hadn’t happened. He said, this is what we have done, these are the consequences we must live with, and these are all the ways in which we’ve got to learn from this. He developed incredible strength, Raheen; but then you came along and all his residual weakness became concentrated on you. Everything he promised he wouldn’t do – like keep quiet about what he’d done, like turn his back on ’71—he did because he was afraid of the consequences of telling you the truth. It was the one thing I could never argue him out of. Didn’t really try hard enough, I suppose.’

‘He brought me up to be someone who’d forgive him.’

‘You sure about that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you forgive him?’

‘Never.’

She gave me a knowing look. ‘Exactly.’

I dropped my gaze from hers.

‘Tell me what’s been happening with Karim,’ she said. I looked at her and knew that she understood about love and friendships getting so tangled it seemed impossible to find your way clear except through following something in the gut that bypassed the brain entirely. If ’71 had defined Aba, it had in some way defined her, too. She married my father and decided it was not something she would ever apologize for. So she became a women who held her head high, not in arrogance, or contempt, but because she knew that it was a form of cowardice to make a choice and then pretend you didn’t really make it. And while my father was charming me, pulling me close to hear his heartbeat, teaching me how to look at the world, she taught me that you didn’t have always to agree with your parents or want to emulate them in order to know they mean the world to you and you to them.

So I told her about Sonia, about Zia, about Karim, and when I had finished the telling, she said, ‘There are no blueprints for love. But you want to know how things unfolded with the four of us?’

You couldn’t escape from my mother’s voice when she wanted it to hold you in place. It reached out to me – honey over gravel – and pulled me into the past, into 1970, to a Karachi before drugs, before guns, before Civil War, before the economy ran on foreign aid, before religion was wielded as the most powerful of political tools. A Karachi in which people stayed. There they all were, in the Nasreen Room – Zafar, Yasmin, Ali, Maheen and all their closest friends – many of them recently returned from university abroad as though it were the most natural thing in the world to come back, to return home, no reason not to. Zafar pulled Yasmin on to the floor, he asked her a question, she replied with coquetry, he thought it was refusal. Everyone’s futures changed, right there.

She walked around the gallery, her hand alighting on this sculpture’s head, that one’s back, but always moving on, and looking in my direction less and less as the story moved to Rahim Yar Khan and then back to Karachi, to Ampi’s, to the racetrack, to the Club. She reached up and swivelled a track light so that her aspect moved in and out of shadows, her voice getting hoarser and everything in my mind more jumbled.

When she had finished, the story taking me past Karim and my first meeting in the cradle, I was more confused than ever. How do you measure love? How do you separate it from selfishness? Think of all the futures that could have been, all the pasts we’d never understand, everything in the present we keep hidden from one another and ourselves, all the futures that still might be. Is love strongest when it holds on or lets go?

I closed my eyes. I imagined Karim walking into the room. All abstractions fled.

Sonia, I’m sorry.

. .

1971

Ali paused, hand on the door knob, and tried to identify the source of the noise from the other side of the door. Plock! Thock! Crash! Plock! Thock! Plock! Thock! Plock! Thock! Crash! He eased open the door and poked his head in, hesitantly, ready to withdraw it in a hurry.

Zafar stood at one end of his drawing room, whacking a tennis ball with his cricket bat—plock! The ball ricocheted off the opposite wall—Thock! Ali noticed the broken glass around the room, remnants of a rather expensive set of whiskey tumblers, of which only two now remained intact on the drinks cabinet.

Crash!

Or, rather, only one now remained.

Ali closed the door behind him and walked closer to Zafar, who still hadn’t acknowledged his presence. There was a cut on Zafar’s arm, with a shard of glass protruding from it. Ali took hold of Zafar’s arm and pulled out the shard.

‘Maheen’s over at Yasmin’s place,’ he said.

‘Thought she might be. I suppose you’re here to ask why I said what I said.’

‘No.’ Ali took the tumbler from the drinks cabinet and poured himself a drink. Bits of glass swirled around in the amber liquid. ‘Honestly, Zafar, this is so irritating,’ he said, looking in disgust at the contents of the tumbler.

Zafar whacked the tennis ball. ‘Well, then, find another bar.’

Ali dipped his handkerchief in the alcohol, carefully avoiding glass, and pressed the wet cloth against Zafar’s gashed arm. Zafar yelled but didn’t move away.

Ali said, ‘I’m here to ask why you haven’t yet attempted to make your apologies and try to patch things up with her.’

‘After what I said? You want me to ask her to forgive that?’

‘Try.’

‘It’s no use.’ Zafar pushed Ali away. ‘Go away, Ali. I don’t want you here. Go back to Yasmin. You know, you’re a lucky bastard to have her.’

Ali saw himself and Zafar reflected in the mirror. Zaf movie-star gorgeous with eyes that revealed every emotion, and he, Ali, fastidious and remote. He turned away and closed his eyes. For how much longer do I have her, how much longer? How can I make her stay? How will I bear it if she leaves? Who would have thought, who would have thought…

…That Zafar could say such a thing. Yasmin sat on the arm of the sofa, and stroked Maheen’s hair as she slept. Tears still not dry on her cheeks. Who would have thought he could say it and then allow the days to slip away, no excuse, no explanation.

She heard someone push open the front door, and left the room to see who it was.

‘Hi.’ It was Ali. He was looking at her strangely. He’d been looking at her strangely since he’d first heard Maheen and Zafar’s engagement was off. ‘Is Maheen here?’ he asked.

There was a hollowness in her stomach, the sudden realization of what it meant, what it meant for Ali, that Maheen was no longer engaged.

‘Yes, she is,’ she replied, holding her head up. She wasn’t going to cry.

How coldly she looks at me.

‘Zafar’s at his house. I just came from there. He refused to discuss it with me, but maybe you…’

Can’t you be more subtle, Ali, about getting me out of the house so you can be here to comfort her? After a year-long engagement, can’t you care a little more?

‘No point denying the obvious, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Things are no longer as they were that night on the balcony when I said I’d marry you.’

No longer the same at all, Ali.

No, no longer the same in any way. My darling, my love.

She took off her engagement ring and handed it to him. ‘Well, thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve been a thorough gentlemen.’

He bowed clumsily. What else to do?

When she closed the front door on her way out of her house, Maheen heard the sound and woke up.

‘What’s going on?’ Maheen asked, coming out into the hallway.

Ali’s fist closed around the ring.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and set the tone for all their years together.

‘To get him back must still be possible.’ Maheen furrowed her brow, trying to understand why Yasmin wasn’t engaged any longer.

If she knows the truth. If she suspects I let him go so he could go to her, she’ll push him hack to me with both hands. But I don’t want him that way. I couldn’t bear to have him that way.

‘I don’t want to get him back. He doesn’t want to get me back.’ She shrugged. ‘It was never this big love thing with us, you know. I thought we could be happy together, that’s all.’

‘You were right. What’s changed? Nothing’s changed.’

No, she’ll never even think of him that way. He’s been engaged to me, how could she think of him that way? Unless, unless…

‘Something has most certainly changed. There’s a new bachelor in town, and he’s not too shoddy.’

Maheen looked at Yasmin uncomprehendingly. Yasmin looked guiltily away. Maheen gasped.

‘Love and war,’ Yasmin shrugged.

‘Yasmin, don’t talk to me. I can’t talk to you about this, I can’t accept this. Not now, not ever.’

‘Everest. Climbing Everest would be easier than understanding you women. Why did you call it off, Yasmin? You think you’ll find anyone better than Ali?’

‘I’m just sitting here, trying to drink my cup of tea and read my magazine in peace. I don’t require polite conversation from the likes of you.’

Zafar’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me what I said.’

Yasmin squinted up at him, standing between her and the Club pool in the bright sunlight. ‘Oh, please! I hardly for a second think you meant it. The unforgivable thing was your refusal to go running after her when she ran out of your house.’

He continued to stand in front of her, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

‘Oh, sit down, Zaf. I can’t see you properly against that sun.’

He sat down. They looked at each other, nothing to say.

‘Can you see me properly now?’

‘Yes. But you’re not much to look at.’

His mouth curved into a smile. ‘Liar.’

She poked him in the ribs, and he laughed and grabbed her hand. Ali’s hand on hers had never had such an effect on her spine: warmth and chills radiated from it at the same time. She closed her eyes.

Maheen, I’m sorry.

‘There’s no call for apology, Zaf. I’m thrilled for both of you.’ What else can I say?

‘But what about you, Ali?’

‘Oh, someone else will come along.’ Yasmin. Yasmin. The sound of my heartbeat.

‘Have you seen Maheen lately?’

‘This is not a waltz, Zafar. We can’t just swap partners.’

‘All this partner swapping. It’s like a square dance.’ Maheen pointed to the book she’d been reading when Ali walked into her garden and found her sitting there. ‘I can hardly keep them all straight. Let’s see… Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander loves Hermia, but Demetrius also loves Hermia though he used to love Helena, who still loves him and so hates Hermia because Demetrius loves Hermia, not her. I mean Helena. Or do I mean Hermia?’

Ali opened his own copy of the same play. ‘Do you? No, you’ve got it right. Let me try the next series of steps. Strike up the band, enter Puck. He pours love-juice on Lysander’s eyes and Lysander finds he loves Helena and hates Hermia…’

‘And so it goes, on and on, the quartet’s affections changing every few minutes…’

‘…Until miraculously, at the end, everyone is paired off – and they all live happily for the next ten minutes, after which the play ends and no one knows anything further.’

Maheen leaned back in her chair, laughing. ‘So the reason you told me to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and meet you for tea is…?’

Ali raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t. You dropped a note off at my place with those very instructions.’

‘Oh. Well, something here is strange.’ She handed him a typewritten note with his name signed at the bottom. ‘So you didn’t write this?’

Ali laughed. ‘We’ll call whoever wrote it “Puck”.’ He straightened his tie and remembered the night he had chiselled her initial into a tree. Whatever had brought that out, surely it could be revived again. Not to that extent, perhaps, not enough to make him pick up hammer and chisel, but some echo of it. He watched her run her fingers along her eyebrows, smoothing down the hairs in that familiar gesture of hers which signified uncertainty, and he thought perhaps he heard an echo.

‘How about it, Maheen? Are you in the mood for a wedding?’

‘Invitation? For me?’ Yasmin ran her fingers along the embossed surface of the card. ‘I half-thought I wouldn’t be invited. Zafar neither.’

‘I half-thought you wouldn’t either, Puck.’ He smiled at her and she didn’t pretend to be confused. ‘But Maheen was in a gentle mood after she heard about Laila, so I took the opportunity to add to our invitation list.’

‘I just heard about the miscarriage. Awful, it’s so awful. Poor Laila.’

‘She nearly died, you know. Loss of blood. But Dolly was at the hospital, visiting a relative, and she heard there was no blood matching Laila’s type, so she called her husband and God knows what strings Anwar pulled but he managed to get hold of a match.’

‘God bless Anwar. And we’re always so snide about his newly-found connections.’ Strange how already it seems a dream or a part I once played, all those months I was engaged to you with no thought of wanting anything differently for the rest of my life.

‘Hmmm. There was some half-deranged guy at the hospital who almost attacked the doctors. Seemed to think those last available units of blood were earmarked for his brother, who died without them.’

‘Good God.’

‘Yes. Apparently the police were called to get rid of him. He was led off screaming about how one day he’ll be rich and powerful and his house will have running water, twenty-four hours a day, gushing out of gold taps.’ Stay where you are. Don’t move any closer. Don’t let me smell that scent of jasmine and spice on your hands. At this distance, I can make myself believe you’re only an old friend.

‘I am so glad I’m not poor. Particularly not in Pakistan.’

‘I’m so glad I don’t know anyone with gold taps.’

‘Silver tea set? What do you think, Zafar? As a wedding present for Ali and Maheen.’

Zafar, when we send out wedding invitations, can we say: no silver, please. Show some originality.

Or we couldjust elope, Maheen. How about it? Today?

‘Silver’s fine, Yasmin.’

Yasmin raised her eyebrows at him across the Ampi’s table. ‘That was a joke. You know Maheen hates silver.’

‘Oh.’ He swirled ice cream around in its pewter bowl.

She had to say it. For all their sakes. ‘Zafar, it’s still not too late for you and Maheen.’

He found he didn’t even have to pause an instant before taking Yasmin’s hand and saying, ‘Yes, it is.’ Guilt had swallowed up everything else between him and Maheen, and for a while he had thought that regret would swallow him up too. But Yasmin had changed that. He suspected people thought him fickle, and if everyone wasn’t so frantically busy trying to put the war and everything associated with it behind them he doubted his engagement to Yasmin would have met with such approval all around.

And Maheen was with Ali. Fine and upstanding Ali.

He didn’t think very hard about Maheen and Ali together. He couldn’t. Not yet.

His other hand closed around Yasmin’s.

But soon.

‘So soon? I thought you’d refuse to see me for at least another decade.’ Yasmin drew Maheen into an embrace. ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you more than a little.’

‘Silly girl, as if you thought I could stay angry for ever. I’ve been picking up the phone to call you every day since Karim was born and twice a day since Raheen was. Did you really imagine I’d turn you away at my doorstep? Ali, what are you doing?’

‘I’m smelling Yasmin’s hands.’

‘Is it a pleasant smell?’ Yasmin smiled at him.

‘Talcum powder.’ Now I know, we’ll all be all right. We’ll all be friends for ever. The echo stronger now than it was the day we got married, and surely it can only amplify as the years wear on.

‘Now all you have to do is convince that husband of yours that all is forgiven,’ Maheen said. ‘What does he want from me, Yasmin, an official letter of pardon?’ Zafar, when we talked of names for the children we were going to have, neither Karim nor Raheen were on the list. I miss you. I miss the way you made me laugh. Come back, in whatever form it is. I’d rather have you as my friend than watch you sulking in corners ashamed to meet my eye each time we meet.

God, Zaf why didn’t you try even once to say you were sorry?

. .

One more month, and the reprieve would be over. I lay down on the bed and looked out through the huge window at the lushness of early summer. Odd to think these paths that I’d walked, that glen in which I’d spotted deer, that student diner where I’d braved the most arctic of nights for a plate of curly fries, would soon only be memory.

‘Out into the real world,’ my classmates and I would chirp, when thinking of graduation and what lay beyond. To them the real world meant work, bills, the start of a road leading to a mortgage, children, a suburban house and a car in the driveway. But what my real world was, I still hadn’t decided.

‘You should stay,’ Zia had said to me on the phone the night before, calling from New York, where he’d gone to talk to real-estate agents. ‘You’re entitled to a year of practical training with your student visa. You should definitely stay. This isn’t about your father any more, Raheen; the way things are in Karachi, you’d be a fool to go home.’

It would be so easy to stay, and convince myself that it wasn’t about my father any more. I hadn’t seen him since that day on the pier. While I was still talking to Ami in the gallery, Aunty Laila had walked back in, and I told her I wanted Uncle Asif to get me on the next flight back to New York. My old school friend Cyrus was there, and I knew he’d put me up until the start of the semester without asking any questions. ‘I just need to go away and clear my head,’ I told Ami, expecting her to argue me out of it, but she had replied, ‘As long as you promise to clear it rather than empty it.’ I didn’t tell her the main attraction of staying with Cyrus was that he could be counted on to envelop me in a whirlwind of activity that made it possible to live from one hour to the next without any thought of what lay beyond, or behind.

There had been a flight that evening. My only qualm was leaving Sonia, but when I called her she said her father was taking the family on Umra. I doubted any desire for religious pilgrimage lay behind her father’s decision; he probably just wanted her out of Karachi so that she wouldn’t have to face the scandal of the broken engagement.

There was a gentle tapping on my door. I ignored it. Probably Zia, back from New York, stopping off to see me on his way to his college. I wanted to lie here and wallow in nostalgia about my college days, not discuss the future and what I honestly thought lay in it for me if I went home. The tapping turned into a loud knocking.

‘Oh, go away,’ I said.

There was the sound of footsteps retreating from my door. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes he gave up so easily. Truth was, one of the things I already regretted most about graduation was that it meant moving out of a place where Zia was less than twenty minutes away by car; it meant Zia would no longer be within my local calling zone with his peculiar nocturnal hours that allowed me to wake from nightmare at four in the morning and call him without hesitation. I walked towards the door. The phone rang.

‘Hello,’ I said into the receiver.

‘Hey, I’ve got an idea.’

‘Zia? Who just knocked on my door?’

‘Tooth fairy. Listen, I have an idea.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t go.’

I covered my eyes with my hand and fell back on my bed. ‘Zia, not this conversation.’

‘No, I’m serious. Move to New York with me.’

‘What do you mean “with me”?’

‘You know. I mean, no strings or anything. Well, not too many of them. But what the hell, you know. Why not? One day at a time.’

I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. ‘Why ruin a beautiful friendship, Zee?’

‘Come on, Rasputin. Come on. Save me from myself.’

‘Zia, I can’t.’

‘It’s Karim, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

I waited for him to remind me that in four months Karim had made no attempt to get in touch with me, and to remind me further that Sonia had still not received any halfway decent proposals and didn’t I see how selfish I was being? But instead he said, ‘Abracadabra, baby. Guess there’s a part of me that still believes in magic.’

‘Thanks, sweetheart.’ I hung up, and opened the door, hoping to find some clue to the identity of the person who had knocked.

‘Ra!’

At first I thought I must have imagined it. The voice came from behind me, it came from inside my room.

‘Open the window, I’m about to fall.’

I swivelled around. One foot on my window ledge, one foot on a tree, head tilted back to prevent the glasses balanced on the edge of his nose from falling off, he was Charlie Chaplin rather than the Romeo I’d imagined when I’d imagined him appearing outside my window.

‘Karim, what are you doing?’ I levered open the window, and fumbled with the clips that kept the screen in place.

‘Attempting the splits, fifteen feet above ground. Could you remove that screen?’

‘No, it’s stuck. You’ll have to go down and use the front door.’

‘I don’t think you appreciate my problem.’ A gust of wind blew and Karim yelped, removed his foot from the ledge and wrapped himself around the tree limb. ‘I can’t get down.’

I put a heavy hiking boot on to my right foot, stood on my bed and kicked the screen. My foot went through the wire mesh.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I thought I’d kick the whole screen off.’

‘Yeah, and then you’d have fallen out yourself.’

I looked at Karim, clutching on to the tree, head still tilted back, and then looked at myself, one foot in a large boot sticking out of the screen. ‘One day we’ll tell our children about this moment,’ I said.

‘Is that “our” as in your children and my children, or “our” as in our children?’

The wire mesh had left cuts all around my ankle, but I really didn’t care. ‘Is that a proposal or a proposition?’

‘I’ll take what I can get.’

Karim looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at the branches beneath him, leapt clear of the limbs and leaves, his arms spread wide, embracing the wind. He jumped up, not down. Lifted himself up, Daedalus for a moment, long enough for me to extend my arm through the jagged screen and feel the air that brushed his fingertips brush my fingertips also; then he was rolling on the grass, the gradient of that patch of lawn carrying him away from the concrete dorm and towards the gravel path.

By the time I made it outside, he was standing up, apparently unharmed. I took his face in my hands. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’

‘Could you bear not to go back to Karachi?’

‘What?’

‘Let’s walk.’

Walk? Who wanted to walk?

We walked. There should have been many questions in my mind, but I was suddenly so happy that all I could think of was something I’d wanted to ask him since he’d yawned and stretched and his shirt had lifted to reveal his stomach in Mehmoodabad.

‘Does that chicken-pox scar on your stomach mark an erogenous zone? Tamara says her boyfriend’s chicken-pox scar does.’

‘Every part of me is an erogenous zone when you’re around,’ he said, as though remarking on the time of day. ‘Now, behave yourself.’ I was raising his T-shirt, and he caught my hand and smacked it lightly. ‘I’m here on serious matters.’ I felt myself grow tense, and he said, ‘Because I’ve seriously discovered that I seriously don’t want to believe that everything between us is over.’

Was this because things were too convoluted to reason out, so he just clutched on to that instinctive need we’d always had for each other? I was afraid to ask.

‘Karim…’ I said, and then didn’t have the words to continue.