Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

He kissed me.

When we finally pulled apart I allowed myself a moment to believe everything had been resolved, but he had his serious face firmly in place as he took my hands in his, and sat me down on a bench at the edge of the glen. ‘I can’t go back to Karachi. It’s starting again. The same kind of stuff that went on in ’71.’ He ran the tip of a leaf down my face. ‘The desperation, the craziness. The stench from the newspapers. This is how it begins.’

I pulled away. ‘Karim, you’re being silly.’

‘Why do you even want to go back, Ra?’

Did I want to go back? Back to a city without glens, without places to sit in public with my arms round his neck, without the luxury of wandering among indistinguishable trees unmindful of the repercussions of getting lost. Back to a city that was feasting on its own blood, the violence so crazy now that all the earlier violence felt like mere pinpricks. Back to a city that bred monsters. Back to a city where I’d have to face my father. Why should I want to go back to any of that?

And yet. When I read the Dawn on-line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing. ‘Because, Karim, you’ve shown me that it’s not so simple to leave a city behind.’

‘You have to see why I can’t go back.’

I nodded. I saw that, for all his obsessing about the city, or perhaps because of his obsessing, Karachi was an abstraction to him, in the way the past is an abstraction, and he lacked the heart to make it a reality. And I saw that everything he had heard about 1971 gave him reason to fear that national politics would again force people he loved to reveal their narrow-mindedness and cowardice and rage, and those people might include Zafar’s daughter, so like her father in so many ways.

‘You were the one who said I needed to stop living in tiny circles.’

‘I’ve found that doesn’t matter to me as much as I thought. Or maybe it’s just that you mean more to me than I knew.’

I stood up, twigs and dry leaves crunching beneath my feet. If Zia had walked through the opening in the trees, I think I might have said yes to New York City and made it all simple.

‘What about Soma?’

He took a deep breath. ‘She’s the loveliest girl in the world. And to marry her because I think no one else will come along for her is such a supreme act of condescension. She said that to me on the phone just the other day.’ He smiled. ‘Except she called it an act of condemnescension.’

‘Just a minute. Aren’t I the loveliest girl in the world?’

‘No, no. You’re not. You’re not, but that doesn’t matter. Not one bit. Just say you won’t go back to Karachi. We’ll escape to the middle of nowhere, and eat roots and berries, and never read a newspaper.’

‘When did love become so dependent on geography?’

‘When personality started to change with location. In Karachi I have to see your reactions to certain things. Amid the roots and berries there’s no cause for those reactions.’

‘I’m sorry if my imperfection makes life inconvenient.’ I jammed my hands in my pocket and stepped further away from him. ‘We can’t all be godlike.’

A twig snapped in his grasp, and birds flew chirping madly out of the tree at the gun-like sound. ‘No, but some of us could try not to be so stubborn and so stupid.’

‘Why don’t you just say whatever you want to say, Karim, before I get really bored? Is there something in my list of faults that you left out when we talked at the beach? You need to get another complaint off your chest?’

‘You’ve had a happy life, haven’t you?’

The shadows were reaching out from the tree trunks, and I shivered and moved into one of the remaining patches of light, but he didn’t follow.

‘You never stopped to consider that your happy family existed at the cost of mine. They should never have got married, my parents. They wouldn’t have, except your father said the most unforgivable thing, and then your mother forgave him for it with such a magnificent show of compassion. Never mind how my mother felt. Never mind that my father might have had feelings about the whole thing. But you haven’t considered that. How could you consider that, when the consideration would disrupt your happiness? How could you consider that if my mother had married him she would have been happy all the years I was growing up, and she wouldn’t have had to cheat and lie and sneak around? You think it’s hard becoming disillusioned with a parent when you’re twenty-one, Raheen? Well, try it when you’re fifteen. God, I was angry with her for over two years. Until I found out what your father said. He was the one who ruined her life, and my father’s, and mine. And don’t you dare look at me as if to say I’m transferring my anger on to your father. This is not transference. It’s the real thing.’

I wasn’t about to defend my father, or even point out how silly it was of him to attack my father and yet simultaneously assume he would have been the perfect husband. ‘I don’t know what this has to do with going back to Karachi. Karim, I don’t understand what we’re fighting about.’

‘You’re going to go back, aren’t you? After everything that’s happened you’re going to go back, because all you really want is to go on the way you’ve been going on. Like your father, who could so easily transfer his affections simply because it was easier to love someone who wasn’t Bengali, you arrange your life around everything that’s easy, even though it means wrapping yourself in a little cocoon and deciding that things that happen away from the street where you live don’t touch you. And then you pretend your street is the world.

‘And what happens tomorrow when you decide that being with me is too hard, what happens then, Raheen? How dispensable will I prove to be? As dispensable as I was when I left Karachi, and all you could do was write letters about how much fun you were having, and how foreign I was becoming day by day, and how you really weren’t interested in anything I had to say about how hard it was, how goddamn miserable it made me, to be away from Karachi, which meant being away from you.’

‘That’s not true, Karim.’ I was pulling a leaf apart between my fingers, the fleshy part separating easily and falling off the veins. ‘Go and read my letters again.’

‘I can’t. I cut them up, remember, and burnt what was left.’

‘Well, I remember what I wrote. I remember I used to tell you everything that was going on in school, every little detail, so that when you came back you wouldn’t have to feel like an outsider for even a second.’

‘You made me feel like the outsider. You told me what was happening without telling me it would be so much better if I were there.’

This was turning into some twisted nightmare. ‘I was only matching the tone you set in your letters, Karim. Your first letter to me, the first correspondence between either of us, started with you saying: Bet you’re boiling in that deadly summer sun, and here it’s cool enough for a sweater. Ha-ha!’ I repeated it again to emphasize the lightness of the letter’s tone. ‘Ha-ha!’

‘How could I use any other tone but “ha-ha!” when it was so obvious you didn’t want to hear anything from me that wasn’t a joke? Raheen, you used to see me crying, before I left Karachi, your best friend since we were born, you used to see me crying, because my parents were always yelling and my father was threatening to take me away and do you know how hard it is for a thirteen-year-old boy to cry in front of anyone? I cried in front of you, only in front of you, because I just needed you to ask what’s wrong and you couldn’t, you couldn’t, you didn’t even care enough to want to know. Go back to bloody Karachi. Go back and turn into Runty and see if I give a damn. Coming here was the stupidest thing I could have done.’

I caught hold of his sleeve. ‘Why did you come, then?’

‘I was going to take you to Boston with me. To see my mother. But I don’t want her to see you.’ He pulled away from me and headed out of the glen.

I threw the bits of leaf at him in frustration but they swirled and came back at me. I could hear his footsteps pick up and become a run, and I knew I’d never catch up with him.

If he’d stayed any longer he would have accused, you still haven’t called my mother. As though it was any easier calling her now I knew what she had suffered at the hands of both my parents. I remembered Aunty Maheen’s voice from that first aborted phone call—Darling, who is it? – and the sudden ache that made me hang up the phone because it wasn’t Uncle Ali she was speaking to. That was four years after the divorce. It made no sense, the strength of my reaction.

Yes, it did.

Yes, it did.

It seemed easier not to see her, that was the truth. It seemed easier not to have to see her and her husband and imagine how Karim must have felt – perhaps still felt – to see them together. Because if I had to imagine how Karim felt about the divorce, I’d have to face how I failed him. I used to walk around all day in those weeks after the divorce trying to shake off the suffocating feeling that came from imagining his hurt, and I felt that if I heard his voice, if I heard him weep, I would break into a million pieces. So instead I told him I didn’t know what to say; when he wrote back, I told myself that if he had my voice inside his head to speak to, that was enough. I never broached the subject again in any of my letters. In doing that, I drew a dividing line between us. I do not want your pain sitting on my heart, boy. Keep it away.

I leaned against the tree. I had done that, and both Karim and I knew it. When he told me I lived in tiny circles, that I didn’t want to acknowledge how I was connected to the outside world, he had been talking about the failure of my friendship to take part of his pain upon myself. Even if he didn’t know that’s what he had been talking about.

I veered off the path, and half-ran, half-slid, down to the river. I sat there a long time, watching the water flow past. Karim’s life after Karachi unfolded in front of me, and I did nothing to stop it, not even when I imagined Aunty Maheen telling him she was leaving. His loneliness then was complete. I stayed by the river long enough to push past tears, past hurt, until what remained was my shame. But I still didn’t leave. I stayed, allowing the shame to grow and grow, until finally there was a tiny exhalation, a release.

I stood up then and made my way back to the present. But when I neared my dorm, there were words etched into the soil near where he had fallen when he leapt from the tree: I’m sorry. I love you.

Or was that a soil-speck, not a full stop, between the first sentence and the second?

. .

In Boston, summer was in full swing. Sunlight glinted off the John Hancock building, glinted off the Charles. A convertible sped past, leaving a smell of ice cream in the air. I glanced down at the directions Aunty Maheen had dictated over the phone.

‘At Storrow Drive get into the extreme right lane…’ It sounded simple enough, but no one had prepared me for the rush-hour traffic of Storrow Drive, the horror of being stuck in the extreme left lane with at least three lanes to traverse and not much time to do it. I emptied my mind of all the rule-bound small-town driving I’d been practising in the last few months, further emptied my mind of the thought that I was driving Zia’s beloved black Integra, and reminded myself that I was a Karachiite. Setting my jaw, I slammed on the horn, spun the wheel to the right and, with an utter disdain for the curses that were hurled in my direction, managed to make it over to the requisite lane well before the turn for Aunty Maheen’s flat.

When the concierge asked who I had come to see I realized I didn’t know Aunty Maheen’s last name any more, so I just said, ‘Maheen,’ and the concierge said, ‘Would that be Mrs Ahmed?’ which seemed a fair bet, so I nodded and was directed to the eleventh floor.

I thought I’d cured myself of the habit of fidgeting with my hair when nervous, but as I stood waiting for someone to answer her door bell I kept pulling the ends of my hair, conscious that it was much shorter than the last time she’d seen me. I hoped she was alone. When I had finally summoned up the courage to call her and say I needed to see her, I had been unable to think of a way to tell her I didn’t want to see the Interloper. Not yet. It had been a strange phone conversation, both of us too aware that I’d been in the US almost four years without calling, and that made unsayable all the truths going through my mind: I’ve missed you; it’s so good to hear your voice; I can’t wait to see you.

The door opened. There she stood. There stood a woman who was closer to being family than anyone in my extended family was, and there was that smile of hers which reminded me that of all her child’s friends, and of all her friend’s children, I had always been her favourite.

‘Hello, loveliness,’ I said, and put my arms around her.

She laughed as she hugged me, all my failures of communication forgiven, and I saw immediately that for all her years away from home she was still a ‘Karachi aunty’ in the best possible sense of the term.

‘Inside, inside, move inside,’ she said when we finally drew apart, taking my coat and hanging it on the clothes rack, off which it promptly slipped. Aunty Maheen moved as though about to pick it up, and then waved her hand dismissively in the coat’s direction. ‘Floor’s clean,’ she said. ‘Now take this’—she handed me a cup of tea—‘and go and sit down, while I finish things in the kitchen.’

I watched her walk towards the kitchen and couldn’t stop smiling. She was a plump woman now, but there seemed something so contented about that. And her walk, her mannerisms, were still so familiar that I wanted to run into the kitchen after her and throw my arms around her again.

I walked across the wooden floor into the living-room area, where the furthest wall had large windows looking down on to the Charles River and on to Boston’s skyline. On the console table against the wall were framed photographs. A couple were of Aunty Maheen and her husband, smiling; several showed Karim in various stages of growing up, including a recent one of him and the Interloper doubled over with laughter, pointing at a burning frying pan; the largest of the photographs showed Aunty Maheen in Karachi with eight or ten of her friends – my parents stood to either side of Aunty Maheen and my father had his arm around her shoulder.

How could she ever think back to what he said to Shafiq and not tear up this photograph?

Aunty Maheen walked out of the kitchen with a plate of pakoras, and sat down right next to me, balancing the plate on her knee. ‘So have you heard from my son?’

Every day. Every hour. A million conversations, none of them real.

‘Raheen?’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘Have you heard from him since you left Karachi, because, sweetie, I haven’t; not that it surprises me.’

‘He didn’t come to see you a couple of weeks ago?’

She shook her head and handed me a small plate of pakoras. ‘He’d been planning to, but I don’t know what happened. He’ll show up eventually. He always does. Oh, look at you.’ She held me at arm’s length and beamed. ‘Much too much to talk about, so let’s start with how is everyone. What are all those scab-kneed boys and girls who my son grew up with doing with their lives?’

‘Nothing special. Finishing university, deciding what next. Waiting for proposals to arrive from boys of good breeding who don’t care that your father is a suspected drugs smuggler.’

Aunty Maheen patted my hand. ‘That was awful. Poor Sonia. Laila told me all about the newspaper announcement. Can you believe anyone would do something so low?’

Such questions are usually rhetorical, but Aunty Maheen looked at me as though expecting an answer. I shrugged. ‘Yes, I believe it. It’s awful, but I believe it. Just as I believe Zia’s father could arrange the police harassment. And I believe all of us just assumed he was guilty. And still do, even though all charges are dropped. I don’t like any of it, but I believe all of it.’

Aunty Maheen nodded. ‘I would never have said that at your age. That’s what it did, you see. Bangladesh. It made us see what we were capable of. No one should ever know what they are capable of. But worse, even worse, is to see it and then pretend you didn’t. The truths we conceal don’t disappear, Raheen, they appear in different forms.’

I nodded and nibbled on my pakora. I hadn’t even spoken to Aba since Karachi, though I sometimes called Ami at the office. She kept telling me to come home.

‘Does it get talked about?’ Auntie Maheen said, ‘The Civil War?’

I shook my head. ‘Only in story fragments.’

Speaking of staying up till dawn, remember during the war when we said we’d keep drinking until sunrise, but that was the night they bombed the oil refineries and the smoke covered the sun, so we just carried on drinking until well after noon.

Don’t you remember the scandal, when she was engaged to him but he was a POW in Bangladesh so she married the other one instead?

Never throw anything away. In ‘yi, when the bomb fell in the empty plot next door to us, the heat from the blast was so incredible the blades of the ceiling fan in our bedroom curled up like a tulip, and don’t you think that would have been worth quite a lot as war memorabilia if I hadn’t chucked it out?

‘Those are the kinds of thing we hear about ’71,’ I told Aunty Maheen, and thought to myself, also, the story of you and my father.

Aunty Maheen said, ‘Also, the story of me and your father.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Also that.’

‘I spoke to him a few minutes ago.’

A pakora fell out of my hand and on to the floor, leaving a smear of chutney on the hardwood.

‘What are you so surprised about? It’s not uncommon for me to talk to them on the phone. You know your mother called me just after both you and Karim left Karachi, to tell me what happened at Asif and Laila’s?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, of course she did. And then I called Ali. To find out who had told Karim about the way the engagement broke off. Of course, I knew it wasn’t Ali…or, at least, not the Ali I had known, although it’s been a while and people change. I have. Who would have thought my Ali would turn into a middle-aged Lothario?’ She looked past me, frowning, not necessarily displeased so much as surprised, perhaps even trying to chart the course her life might have taken if both she and Uncle Ali had given each other the room to turn away from the caricature of opposites that their marriage settled into. ‘First proper conversation I’ve had with him in years. Not just some formal talk to discuss Karim’s flight details or school reports. We were never very good at talk, Ali and I. But I think we’ve improved with age.’

‘So was he the one…who told Karim?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be absurd. No, Ali and I did some detective work. Turns out it was Runty. One year when she was visiting London. And a cousin of mine provided confirmation of the details.’ She waved her hand. ‘But that’s not important any more, is it?’

‘What is important?’

Aunty Maheen patted my cheek. Her hand was warm, but the rings on her fingers were cold. ‘You and Karim. When I spoke to your father just now, he told me what you said to him on the Lady Lloyd Pier. He told me you think you and Karim would be together if it wasn’t for Zafar and my story standing between you. Child, that’s ridiculous.’

‘I know,’ I admitted. ‘I know I let Karim down. That’s the real issue between us. But what I did is made so much worse by the fact that it wasn’t just anyone doing it, but Zafar’s daughter doing it to Maheen’s son. I don’t know if he can get past that. I don’t know what I need to do to get both of us past that.’

‘I think that’s why your parents are the best couple I know,’ she said. ‘You feel they know how to get past anything.’

‘But…’ It seemed a desperate breach of form and manners to say this, but I had to. ‘But you and Aba were in love.’

‘God, yes,’ she said, and smiled in a way I might smile if someone mentioned my teenage crush on Zia. ‘But lots of people are in love lots of times. Yasmin and Ali were in love, too, though in a different way. And Yasmin and Zaf were in love, still are. The most surprising thing of all is that one day Ali and I were in love, also, though that came much later. And then, we weren’t.’ She laughed. ‘It would all be very silly if it didn’t wreak such havoc in our lives. The issue is not who paired off with whom – I’ve been trying to learn when to use the word “whom”, sweetie, was that correct? – but who was able to make it work and how. Your parents did.’

‘So it’s not so special, is that what you’re saying? What I feel for Karim.’

‘Oh, darling. The thought of the two of you together brings such tears of joy to my eyes.’ She kissed the side of my head and handed me the entire plate of pakoras.

‘I’m really very confused,’ I said. ‘OK, one question: how do you forgive what he said?’

She stood up and started walking around the flat, hugging her paisley shawl close in the air-conditioned air. ‘I thought I was showing courage by staying in Karachi during all that madness, and I’m still not sure I wasn’t. But, you see, I was a Bengali. I was born that way. So though people turned away from me at parties, and conversations stopped when I entered the room, and all sorts of things went on that no one should have to live through, there was a certain…resignation, almost, in people’s attitudes towards me. I was just a Bingo, nothing to be done about it. But your father…your father was something much worse. He was a turncoat, a traitor. A Bingo-lover.’ She said the words slowly, as if examining them, trying to unravel their mystery. ‘That evening – when Shafiq got the telegram about his brother – Zafar had just come back from hospital. Broken rib, fractured thumb, bruises everywhere. He claimed he’d been mugged and beaten, but no one was fooled. There was violence in the air those days, and why should your father have been expected not to get terrified of it? Whatever he said to Shafiq, awful as it was, I don’t believe he meant it.’

‘If you didn’t believe it, you would have married him.’

Aunty Maheen walked over to the window and looked down at a bridge being raised so a boat could pass through. ‘You weren’t alive in those days. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She had never spoken to me in that tone before.

I walked over to the window. It was certainly pretty, the view of the river and the tall buildings, but I wondered what Aunty Maheen saw when she looked out. Did she see home?

As if she had read my mind she said, ‘I don’t think I could ever bear to go back to Karachi. First it was because I knew the kind of whispers that would go around about me. I think I was afraid almost – of being shunned, of having backs turn on me a second time round. And now…’ She ran her fingers over a book on the console table that had pictures of some of Karachi’s landmarks on the cover. ‘Now, it’s changed so much it might break my heart to see it. To be reminded that, after all, after everything, I’ve ended up a foreigner in that city.’

I put my arm around her, and thought of all my friends who weren’t planning to return to Karachi after university. Zia was still trying to convince me that I, too, should stay in America. He had even called up one of his father’s contacts who worked in a travel agency in New York and got him to agree to hire me. He meant well, so I didn’t tell him it was the kind of thing his father would have done. Besides, I hadn’t decided to turn down the job yet. What kind of home would home be without my friends in it?

‘I need to find a way to forgive my father. I think you’re the only person who can help me do that.’

‘No. I’m not. He is.’ Aunty Maheen lifted the Karachi book and shook it. A thin blue piece of paper with writing on either side fell out from between the pages. ‘This may help; it may not.’ Aunty Maheen handed me the blue paper. ‘As soon as you called I knew it was finally time to give it to you. I’ve had it a long, long time. Your father wrote it to me. I’m going down to the store to get something for dinner. You’re staying the night, of course.’

She left me alone, and I picked up the paper, and started to read.

Dear Maheen,

Already I’m thinking ahead to how I’ll end this letter, and in case you haven’t yet scanned ahead to find the answer to that question, let me tell you it will be with the phrase: my love always, Zafar.

I will show this letter to Yasmin when it is finished. She will approve the ending.

I’m more glad than I can say that the two of you are reconciled now that Raheen and Karim are born. I have seen you look at your son and then at Ali, and even I’m not vain enough to believe you are thinking of me for even a moment. But I know the first thought you have – will have, have already had, are having even now – of me in conjunction with your child will he: thank God. Because if we had been married your Karim would not have been born, nor would my Raheen – and how can we love the notion of some hypothetical children that might have been more than we love these tiny-fisted creatures who yesterday seemed entirely unaware of each other for fifty-nine minutes of the hour they were together, yet turned to each other in that sixtieth minute, and Raheen – with eyes shut – reached out and put a hand on Karim’s cheek, and Karim kept looking at her without blinking.

I picture them already as firm friends. And then I picture them growing up, and, Maheen, what will I say to my daughter when she is old enough to understand the truth and all its implications?

Nothing can excuse or erase what I said. So why am I writing this letter? To tell you that if you want me to stay always silent about how things ended between us, I will. But your heart has always been far greater than mine, so let me first – please, Maheen, don’t stop reading. I should tear this up, it makes little sense, but if I wait to write again until I can craft every sentence, I may never write.

What I was saying was – oh, I don’t even know. But I know this – it is less than two years since Bangladesh was born, and already we in Pakistan have become so efficient at never speaking about it. That scares me more than anything else. When we do refer to ‘yi, it’s as personalised stories about sitting on the roof, sipping whisky and watching the dogfights in the sky, or about waiting for a dawn that never came because the oil refineries were bombed and a thick cloud of smoke shut out the sun. We tell these stories and contain the horrors of war into four-line anecdotes that we tell over tea and biscuits.

I don’t claim to be better than any of the people who do this – it’s simply that my war story is you, Maheen, and you will not be contained within four lines; instead, you bring up all the memories the rest of us try to forget.

What happens when you work so hard to forget a horror that you also forget that you have forgotten it? It doesn’t disappear – the canker turns inwards and mutates into something else. In this city that we both love and claim – even though our families’ histories lie elsewhere – what will the canker become? This is turning into a diatribe, I know, but I must say it because all the silence around me is so terrifying. Yes, I am terrified, Maheen – because this country has seen what it is capable of, but it hasn’t yet paused to take account.

We should not have kept our name.

Pakistan died in 1971. Pakistan was a country with two wings – I have never before thought of the war in terms of that image: a wing tearing away from the body it once helped keep aloft – it was a country with a majority Bengali population and all its attendant richness of culture, history, language, topography, climate, clothing…everything. How can Pakistan still be when all of that, everything that East Pakistan added to the country, is gone? Pakistan was a nation with an image of itself as a place that was created because that creation was the only way its leaders saw possible to safeguard the rights of a minority power within India. How can Pakistan still be when we have so abused that image – first by ensuring the Bengalis were minimised and marginalised both politically and economically, and then by reacting to their demands for greater rights and representation with acts of savagery? How can Pakistan still be when the whole is gone and we are left with a part? (When we are willing to treat a part as the whole don’t we fall victim to circumscribed seeing, a thing we can ill afford?) We should have recognised that the Pakistan of dreams died and was buried in the battle fields of ’71. Or…

Or, Maheen, is it possible to reclaim a name?

It is a name for which I have great affection, great regard. But what must be done to restore it to what it could have stood for? Perhaps our children will answer that question one day, if we give them the tools – the information – they need for that task.

We act as though history can be erased. Of course we want to believe that – the cost of remembering may break our wilted spirits. But if we believe in erasure we tell ourselves it is possible to have acts without consequences. The finger squeezing the trigger becomes a thing apart from the bullet that speeds across the sands, which becomes a thing apart from the child looking down at his blood pumping out of his heart. And that child, that bullet, that finger, they become things way, way apart from our lives, here, in rooms where we look upon our own sleeping children.

I don’t know if I’ve made any sense, and now I’m blotting the ink with these meaningless tracks of tears.

I will – if you allow it, and I’ll take your silence as ayes – I will tell my daughter what I did – no, let me not phrase that in the past: I will tell my daughter what I have done – when she is old enough to grasp how unforgivable it was. When she is old enough to look within and around, and understand the canker. And this is the form my own canker will take: the fear, the fear always, that when I tell her she will turn away from me.