Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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So here is my promise to you: I will help Yasmin bring up our daughter in such a way that she will have to look at me in horror when I finally tell her the truth of what I said.

There is nothing that gives me more joy these days than looking at you and knowing you are happy. My love always,

Zafar

. .

When I arrived back in Karachi that summer, the summer of 1995, he was waiting for me at the airport. Waiting inside the terminal. Uncle Asif’s contacts again, no doubt.

I walked towards him, jet-lagged, the strap of my carry-on flight bag cutting into my shoulder. ‘I read the letter you wrote Aunty Maheen,’ I said.

‘I know. Did I sound like a self-righteous ass?’

‘Yes,’ I said, and then I quoted the last three paragraphs of the letter back to him.

When he put his arms around me, there was a hesitation on both our parts, but although I didn’t hug him back I didn’t feel the need to pull away either, and that, at least, was a start.

I had read all the papers on the Net, detailing showdowns, stalemates, body counts, analyses, but when I stepped out of the airport and headed home what struck me most was the vulnerability of cars. Glass on all sides, barring neither stares nor fists nor bullets. And was that man criminal, lunatic or immortal angel that he could stand on the pavement, smoking a cigarette, as though life’s greatest danger was falling ash?

Electricity failures and water shortages. Humidity that sheened my skin with sweat, seconds after I stepped out of the air-conditioned car. What water there was, was warm. Electricity repairmen needed police escorts to guard them from Karachiites living in dark and heat for days at a time. But what of those areas the police dared not go to for fear of being attacked themselves? To counter the electricity shortage, there was a ban on neon lights. Driving home from the Club at dinner time was like driving through a ghost town – darkness everywhere save for traffic lights, and who wanted to risk stopping at a red light in those days?

‘Aunty Maheen, have you heard from Karim?’

‘No, darling, just postcards. He’s teaching English in Mexico somewhere. Hasn’t got a phone, and, frankly, sweetheart, the way things are in Karachi, if I do speak to him I’ll do everything I can to dissuade him from entering those city limits.’

Rocket launchers and gunfire in Boat Basin. Sonia’s brother, Sohail, was there when it happened. He told us about the incredible illumination of the night sky when the rocket launchers exploded and how the sound of bullets at first resembled firecrackers. How often we’d stopped in that part of town over the years, after school and after parties, scrounging through one another’s purses and wallets for money to spend on meals at Chips and Mr Burger and Flamingo Chaat. How could the violence reach somewhere so familiar?

‘Why don’t you just stop reading the papers?’ Zia said to me on the phone from New York.

There were mornings when that was a tempting idea, but I found I could no longer say to the world, there’s nothing I can do to change this, so why think too hard about it? I still didn’t think there was anything I could do to change the situation, but now it felt like an abomination to pretend to live outside it.

I learnt about the cyclical nature of violence that summer. Since November when the army had pulled out of Karachi after failing to quell the ‘law and order situation’, law-enforcement had returned to the hands of the Rangers (I had once thought their name amusing, but there was no comedy to be found in the mention of them anymore) and their attempts to bring about security through ruthlessness was only breeding further terrorism. Extra-judicial killings every day. And there was a split in the MQM – the work of the intelligence agencies, so the rumour went, who saw (or thought they did) the efficiency of getting a group to break in two, each side turning bloodily on the other. But all the political analyses in the world couldn’t quite explain what was happening in Karachi – what can explain men on motorbikes spraying bullets everywhere, killing without regard for ethnicity or age or gender?

From Dawn newspaper:

June 23: Twenty-four people were killed and several others wounded in targeted attacks, sniping and gunbattles between rangers, police and armed youths on Friday, raising the month’s death toll to 204.

June 24: Twenty people were killed and many others wounded as widespread violence paralysed the city on Saturday. Two policemen, two MQM workers, two truck drivers, a PPP activist, and a police informer were among those who fell victim to the shooting spree.

June 25: At least 32 people lost their lives and many others were wounded as the city witnessed one of the worst days of violence on Sunday, marked by several rocket and grenade attacks.

June 26: 23 people were killed and many others wounded in the city, which remained in the grip of armed youths.

June 27: Fourteen people were killed on Tuesday as the city tried to limp back to normality

Every night, the Ghutnas gathered, and though there were interludes of revelry, in the end every evening’s conversation was ultimately unchanging. ‘Haalaat bohot kharab hain,’ they would say, again and again, as if English could not encompass just how bad the situation was; and then the conversation varied in its unvarying way from wondering if those accused of the killing were really guilty or just being set up; and how big a part did the ubiquitous Foreign Hand have in all of this; and could the city fall apart in such fashion without some government involvement; and were drug wars part of the reason for the violence; and which businesses had decided to start working through the strikes called by the politicians; and could the ‘talks’ actually achieve anything or were they merely occasions for both sides to pretend to talk peace while really recouping their losses and getting ready for the next round of firing; and could this city – my city, this ugly, polluted, overpopulated, heartbreaking place – retain its spirit after all this battering? And finally, inevitably, someone would say: It’s like 1971. Except that the army will decimate us before they allow Karachi to break away. And it always fell to my father to say. ‘No one wants civil war. Don’t say it’s like ’71. Don’t even think it.’

Sonia’s father was more popular than ever in the wake of the dropped drug charges, thanks to the aplomb with which he had sent out poppy-shaped invitation cards to a magnificent party, just after he got back from Umra. Karachi is a city that applauds spunk, so the Ghutnas clasped the Lohawallas to their bosoms for the first time and Sonia’s mother’s dressing table collapsed under the weight of all the party invites. No one mentioned that the proposals for Sonia’s hand had dried up completely.

But Sonia had to live with the memory of all that had happened, and with the news that our friend Nadia, in London, was on the verge of getting engaged to Sonia’s almost-fiancé, Adel Rana, and I knew she would never tell me how she felt about it all, because I’d always believed her father was guilty and I hadn’t tried very hard to hide it from her.

In Newsline, the sentence ‘“What we are seeing today in Karachi is a repeat of the East Pakistan situation,” maintains a senior security official.’

‘Is that true?’ I asked Ami.

‘Ask Maheen that. She’ll tell you never to compare Muhajirs to Bengalis. Being pummelled makes it easy for us to wring our hands and forget all we’re guilty of. We left India in ’47—we left our homes, Raheen, think of what that means – saying we cannot live amid this injustice, this political marginalization, this exclusion. And then we came to our new homeland and became a willing part of a system that perpetuated marginalization and intolerance of the Bengalis. No, Karachi is not a repeat of the East Pakistan situation.’ She pressed a red rose petal between her thumb and forefinger. ‘But.’

‘But?’

‘But there are certain parallels. History is never obliging enough to replay itself in all details. Not personal history, not political history. But we can learn how to rise above the mistakes of the past, and that we haven’t done. As a country we haven’t. Not in the slightest. Your father’s letter to Maheen seems to have more than an element of prophecy in it, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You were right. He looked the country in the eye. And then, he found a way still to want to stay.’ I rested my head on her shoulder. ‘That’s sort of remarkable.’

I could see his shadow outside the door; I knew he was listening when I said that.

Zia was in New York, working with an investment bank; Nadia was in London on an extended holiday, telling everyone that Adel Rana had nothing but good things to say about Sonia but of course he couldn’t be expected to marry into a family accused of drug smuggling; the twins were on the west coast of America, one working at an architect’s firm in LA, the other immersed in Web design in San Francisco; Cyrus had joined a multinational in Karachi, primarily so that he could get a foreign posting within a couple of years, and he never said a word about Nadia, whom he had loved and been loved by, but to no avail because he was Parsi and she was Muslim; Sonia’s brother, Sohail, was just a few months away from starting college in New York, and there was talk of Sonia going to New York at the same time to visit family, which meant she was to be shown around to eligible Pakistani boys on the East coast, though her father had emphasized that she was to steer clear of Zia. And Karim…

Squash courts were my refuge that summer. We played every evening, a motley group of ten or twelve of us, arriving at the courts at four and staying until eight, returning home too exhausted to think of much beyond dinner and a video and sleep. Cyrus’s sister confided in me, ‘I love the squash courts. There are so many places to hide if gunmen break in.’

Zia came home briefly. His father thought he was dying, though the doctors insisted it was chronic indigestion. His father gave him a spare key to his filing cabinets, which were overflowing with incriminating evidence and rumour and supposition about everyone we knew. ‘Burn the files,’ I told Zia, but Zia said I’d lost my chance at having a say in his life. He didn’t call Sonia at all.

At the airport, we were told our flight to Lahore was delayed, but the airline was offering us complementary breakfast in the lounge. ‘But it’s only cheese sandwiches, and I want halva puri,’ I told the airline official. ‘Sonia, call your car back and let’s go for halva puri.’

The airline official said we couldn’t go. ‘It’s not safe, wandering around town, two girls. Stay here and I’ll call my wife and tell her to send halva puri over with my son.’

‘You’re just afraid we won’t come back and the flight will be delayed because of us.’

The man shook his head and held out his car-keys: ‘If you must go, here, take my car.’

I thought, I must tell Karim about this man. I must tell Karim so much.

In Lahore, I met Uncle Chaperoo, now a government minister. ‘Are you heading south soon?’ I asked him.

‘What? To Multan?’ He tilted his large head to one side.

‘South of the country, not the province,’ I said. ‘Oh God, Karachi. No, of course not.’

Not really so long ago that Uncle Chaperoo’s was the face I imagined when I imagined Romeo; not really so long since he’d cut the romantic figure of a man defying convention by marrying outside his tribe. And now he said the problem with Karachi was that it was such a mishmash, no good could come from rampant plurality. His wife was not around when I saw him. They weren’t divorced, just indifferent.

‘Multan! South! Such circumscribed seeing,’ I said to Sonia. ‘This holiday isn’t doing much for me. Let’s go home,’ and we took the next flight out. On my way home from the airport I remembered that was a phrase from Aba’s letter: Circumscribed, seeing, a thing we can ill afford.

The Prime Minister told reporters the country was doing well. When asked about Karachi, she said Karachi was only ten million people.

Aunty Laila gripped me by the elbow in the doorway to the chemist’s and hissed, ‘We have to get out of here. Act casual.’

Numb could be mistaken for casual. I let her pull me out, my eyes sweeping the area for the glint of sun on trigger. Perhaps we should say something, warn the other shoppers. On the ground, a package. I tumbled into Aunty Laila’s car and ducked low in the seat. Still unable to speak, I gestured to her driver to step on it.

Aunty Laila opened the back door. Slowly, so slowly.

A man reached down to pick up the package.

Aunty Laila put a hand to my forehead. ‘There’s a journalist in there. I don’t want tomorrow’s papers announcing SOCIALITE BUYS SUPPOSITORIES.’

The man pulled a kabab roll out of the bag, and began to chew.

I heard Aba and Ami talking to Aunty Maheen on the phone. They sat right next to each other, his arm around her shoulder, with the phone held between them. They were both laughing.

***

I was supposed to be looking for a job, but what did I want to do with my life?

The memory of his throat beneath my mouth, the sting of aftershave in the cut on my lip…

A nomad from Uncle Asif’s dune begged Uncle Asif to get him a job in Karachi. Even now, even at this time, it was still a city that beckoned. Uncle Asif said that nomad was little older than I was, and I wondered if among his few possessions were a pair of marbles that looked like the eyes of a goat.

‘Why are there no parties, why are there no parties?’ Aunty Runty wept. ‘I can’t bear all this sitting at home, I can’t bear my own imagination.’

Naila hadn’t appeared with her coconut oil at anyone’s house since early May.

Orangi, Korangi, Liaquatabad, New Town, Golimar, Machar Colony, Azizabad, Sher Shah…violence in all those parts of town whose unfamiliarity still felt like a blessing. But then, six died in Kharadar, including a beggar girl. As I read through the newspaper article I saw, between one word and the next, images of bullets and bodies, the wounded weeping for the dead, crushed and broken sugar cane kicked aside by fleeing feet; balloons burst around me and the ground outside the white-tiled hotel rushed up to meet me. Gravel bit into my skin. A man cradled a boy’s blood-dark head in his lap, whispering, ‘Ocean, oceano, samundar, mohit, moa shoagor, umi, bahari, valtameri…’

Sonia called me late one night. ‘Just so sick of it. Everyone is gloom and doom and harpoon happiness. But just listen to what happened to me this evening. Ama and I had gone to my grandparents’ house for dinner – Aboo’s in Islamabad, and who ever knows where Sohail is these days? – and as we were walking to our car to leave, this man, real chichora type, leapt out of the shrubs, caught Amma’s wrist and said, “Give me your car-keys.”’

‘No!’

‘Yes, na, I’m telling you. So Amma became suddenly hysterical and she’s trying to find the key in her bag but the clasp is so complicated it takes real techknowhow to get it open, and even when she finally manages to do that her hands are shaking so much that she can’t really find anything, so then the man starts to put his hand down his shalwar and said, “Hurry up and give me the keys or I’ll take out my TT.” And Ama went completely mental and started throwing the contents of her bag at this guy, yelling, “No, no, anything but that,” and the man got such a shock, what with Ama and also the neighbour coming to see what the commotion was all about, that he ran away. I turned to Ama and I said, “You know, a TT is a kind of gun,” and she said, “Oh, thank God, I thought he was going to show us his privates.”’

I reminded Sonia that before this summer we used to be able to laugh without consciously thinking, Now I’m laughing. Now the suffocation is gone from my lungs for a moment.

She reminded me there hadn’t been much cause for laughter in the winter either.

All mobile-phone services had been suspended because there were strong indicators that such a mode of communication aided terrorist activities.

My car developed a flat tyre when I was driving home from the Club. When I got out of the car to check it, a Suzuki van stopped and three men got out. A cyclist pulled over beside me. A fruit seller walked across the street towards me. I knew why they stopped, I knew what they were going to do. They told me to sit back in the car, with the air conditioning on. It was a hot, sticky day. They changed the tyre for me, and then they all left.

It was exactly the sort of thing you’d expect unknown men to do in Karachi.

I walked into Zia’s room as he was packing to return to New York. He lugged his suitcase off his bed, making room for me to lie down. But I felt awkward, said I should leave. He said he wasn’t planning to come back to Karachi and who knows when he’d see me again. So how much did it really matter what happened between us, this once?

I said, ‘Let’s go for a drive. I don’t feel comfortable here, having this conversation, with your parents maybe walking by on the other side of the wall.’ We drove out in his Integra, though all summer I had kept my movements confined to houses and squash courts as much as possible.

I felt no pleasure, no anticipation, as we drove, just some numb sense of inevitability. Zia’s face unreadable. Where were we going? How deserted the streets were, so soon after sunset. Near the submarine roundabout he turned off the main road. We were going to one of Sonia’s father’s offices, the one closest to home. Desk, phone, fax. Makeshift work space for days when it was too dangerous to head to offices in other parts of town. Green carpet. Nothing of real importance there, no caretakers and guards keeping watch. Years ago, Sonia had showed us we could unlock the door with a penknife. Zia swerved, without slowing, around a stalled car blocking the road. A man stepped out from behind the car, right into the path of Zia’s car. Zia spun the wheel. Braked. The man, uninjured, pointed a gun through the window.

‘It must be fate,’ he said.

It was the car thief.

He directed us to get out of the car.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, we’ll get you a job. I thought my friend had arranged it.’ Zia was sweating in the still night air.

The man shook his head. ‘Your friend did arrange it. Lohawalla Sahib tracked me down, found me a job. I owe him a lot. But my brother’s been shot. You don’t need to know details, but he’s been very angry, done a lot of foolishness. Still, he’s my brother. And if I don’t get him to the hospital he’ll die. But if I try driving from here to there, the police will stop me, and then they’ll recognize him. They won’t stop a car with a girl in it.’

He opened the back door of the stalled car. The brother lay there, unmoving. The first-aid box from Sonia’s father’s office was open next to him, its contents strewn around the car. Zia’s expression passed from fear to something more complicated, something that had to do with the shadows he’d always lived among. He took the man’s arms and started to pull him out. ‘Help me, Raheen.’ The car thief still had his gun trained on us. I caught the brother’s feet as Zia pulled him further and further out of the car. That wasn’t sweat, as I had first thought, on the man’s shalwar-kameez. We put him in the back seat of Zia’s car and drove to the government hospital. The private hospitals wouldn’t deal with a gunshot wound. There were Ranger vans everywhere, but no one stopped us.

Outside the hospital, the pavement was covered with bodies, all lined up side by side. The car thief – Mohommad – laughed to see me cover my eyes when I saw them. ‘They’re sleeping,’ he said. ‘They have relatives in there, and they don’t have money for hotels or even transportation. So they sleep here at night, and in the morning they’ll see their family members, or find out if they’ve died.’

In the emergency ward, chaos. So many people there was no room to bring a stretcher through. Zia and Mohommad carried in the brother, conscious now, and slumped him against a wall. No beds available, not even a chair. Not nearly enough doctors. I find myself moving away from the three men, even though I should be telling Zia we can go home now. I am moving among groans and cries and sights I will never forget. Surely someone should be moving faster. Surely the world should be moving faster. A man is talking to a woman who has a crying toddler in her arms. The man is holding a syringe, though he is clearly not a doctor. But he speaks to her and she nods. When he empties his syringe into the child’s vein, pain eases off the child’s face. The woman holds her arm out, too. The man leans very close to her. Some sort of bargaining will go on. A man in a white coat pushes past me. I hear him say, ‘We’ve run out of blood.’ Another replies: ‘Scrape it off the walls of the operating theatre.’ A sleek cat pads past me. This, more than anything, makes me want to throw up. Zia catches my arm. I say, ‘We should give blood.’ He tells me we can leave. I open my mouth to say yes, but a doctor has overheard my previous comment, he’s asking me what blood type I am. I tell him. He asks Zia. Zia pretends not to know, but I know that he’s lying and I tell him so. He pulls his blood-type card out of his wallet. The doctor says we’re both needed to give transfusions, immediately. But shouldn’t someone test our blood first? A patient lying nearby says, ‘Test for what? Fatal diseases?’ There is much laughter around him. I have lost sight of Mohommad and his brother. I think of them as my allies now. No sheets on the bed I am made to lie on. The needle plunges in while I am looking away, and I panic: was it sterilized? Was it new? No one has time to answer me. A man I don’t much like the look of is in the bed beside me. He’s been in a shoot-out. I hear someone say he’s killed people. ‘Was it sterilized?’ I keep asking and someone says, ‘Yes, yes,’ but the tone is impatient. What can anyone do about it now if it wasn’t? Zia comes to find me. His head is spinning. They took more blood, he thinks, than is safe. I ask him about the needle. He hadn’t thought to check. We dare not think about it. We ask about Mohommad and his brother. No one knows. But we don’t leave. We ask every doctor and orderly who passes by about the man with the bullet in his abdomen. Someone tells us Zia’s blood couldn’t save the girl on the bed beside him. My man, they think, will live. His mother is at the hospital. She finds me. She tells me I might think my blood has gone to waste, because it is a certainty, not just a probability, that sooner or later, probably sooner, another bullet will find its way to her son’s heart. ‘Then your blood will be spilled on the streets of Karachi. But for every day of extra life you’ve given him, I thank you.’ We see Mohommad at last. His brother is dead. We offer to stay. He shakes his head. He asks me, ‘Where’s that hero friend of yours? America or England?’ I say I don’t know. He asks me the hero’s name. I say, ‘Karim.’

His name is like cool water in my mouth.

Zia drives us back to his house. We lie on his bed together, and hold each other close, trying not to strain our ears for the sound of some infection coursing through our veins.

. .

‘Aba, what really happened?’

For two months we had barely spoken, this question unvoiced, unanswered between us. But now he said, ‘I can’t tell you that.’ Before I could respond he held up a hand. ‘But I’ll tell you what I remember. Should we go outside?’

I led the way out of the house into the garden. It was dark, starless, and the day’s heat still hadn’t dissipated despite the welcoming sea breeze. Ami was asleep. He had brought me out here so I could raise my voice at him without waking her up.

In the garden, we stood feet away from each other, and he started to speak before my eyes had adjusted to the dark enough to see his expression.

‘Where do I begin?’ he said softly.

He wasn’t really speaking to me, but I answered all the same.

‘Start with what you were thinking, just before Shafiq walked up to your door with the telegram. Do you remember that?’

‘Oh, yes.’ I could see his expression now, but I couldn’t read it. ‘Oh, I remember that all too well. I was thinking, what if it never ends?’

‘The war?’

‘No, no. The war had ended. Had just ended. The war ended and Bunty and his friends – my friends – had beaten me up in the squash courts because I was, in their words, a Bingo lover.’

That particular insult had no place in my life. All I could think of were old English women playing some incomprehensible game in large, sterile halls.

‘I was still aching from the bruises. Aching, and thinking, what if time only exacerbates people’s wounds, intensifies their madness. I was thinking, suppose I have to leave Karachi to escape all this. And then, it happened.’

‘Shafiq knocked on the door?’

‘No. I thought it. I thought, how much easier my life would be if I wasn’t engaged.’

Oh, Aba. ‘Was that the first time…?’

‘No. No. Not by a long shot.’

He ran his hand over his face, and I looked away, biting back the words. You weak, selfish man.

‘And then Shafiq rang the bell. I opened the door. He said, “You’re going to marry one of them. You’re going to let her have your children. How?”’

He was looking off over my shoulder now, looking towards the front door as though Shafiq were standing right there, even though that house, that scene-of-the-crime from over twenty years ago, had been long ago demolished to make way for an apartment block.

‘His eyes, Raheen, they were so crazed. Crazier than Bunty’s had been when he hit me. And I saw something glinting in his hand. I thought it was a knife. It wasn’t; it was a tea-spoon, but I didn’t know that. I thought it could be a knife. And Maheen was in the house.’

This was the way out. Oh, thank you, god. Here was the reason, the explanation, the way out. I laughed with relief. ‘You knew what to say to placate him and make him leave, didn’t you? You knew if he believed you were on his side, he’d leave. Before he saw Aunty Maheen and hurt her, he’d leave. That’s all you wanted, Aba.’ I put a hand out and caught his collar. ‘We all think selfish, horrible things. We all do. But right then, you just wanted to protect her.’

His eyes left the front door and returned to me. ‘Yes, you’re right. Completely right and completely wrong. I knew what to say to make him leave. And I knew what to say to make Maheen leave me.’ He took hold of my shoulder. ‘I heard the kitchen door swing open as I stood there. I knew Maheen had walked out into the hallway, where she could hear everything.’

‘She could hear everything, yes, but you also knew that if she walked a step further, Shafiq would have seen her. You had to get him out of there, right then. That was your first concern.’ I banged his chest with my fist. ‘You thought he had a knife. Bunty, your old friend, Bunty, had beaten you up, and he hadn’t lost a brother.’

‘I could have pushed him out and slammed the door and locked it.’

‘You don’t push men with knives, Aba. You talk them down. You placate them.’

‘I could have said, actually we’ve just broken our engagement. Let’s go to your place and I’ll tell you all about it.’

‘He would have guessed you were lying. You had to say something shocking enough that he wouldn’t see it as a lie…’

‘I couldn’t leave Maheen. Just after the war, how could I bring myself to leave her with everything going on. But if she left me, if I said something completely unforgivable…”

‘You wanted to save her.’

‘I wanted to save myself.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’ We both said that, at exactly the same instant, and both fell silent.

‘That look in her eyes, Raheen,’ he said eventually. ‘When I turned to look at her, just after I said what I said. I would have given up anything – my city, my friends, my life – to erase that look from her eyes. It’s when I knew I still loved her, beyond everything else. But when I opened my mouth to explain, I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I had said it. Right then two entirely divergent explanations asserted themselves with equal force in my brain. Both, Raheen, seemed possible. Perhaps that was crime enough: that both seemed possible.’ He sounded unutterably weary. ‘Which isn’t to say it doesn’t matter. The truth matters, of course. Was I the protector or the coward? I don’t know.’ He pulled himself up straight. ‘I’ll never know.’

Without waiting for a response, he walked past me, back to the house. As I watched him go, I knew I wasn’t watching either the father I adored or the father who had betrayed me with his own weakness, but a middle-aged man who had revealed to me the terror and the pity that I might still just be able to avoid.

. .

There are two ways to escape suffering [the inferno where we live every day]. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

– Italo Calvino

Karim,

There’s a street in Karachi that follows the moon.

Near an Imam Baragh, there’s a line of houses, with hack and front doors and no boundary walls. When the lunar calendar enters the month of Muhurram, Shia women make their way to the Imam Baragh daily. There is a back door to the Imam Baragh for them, for the ones in purdah, and to reach that back door without being gazed upon by strangers in the open streets they walk through the neighbourhood houses. Back and front doors are flung open, and the women walk through from the hallway of one house to the hallway of another until that alley within houses takes them all the way to the door of the Imam Baragh. It is an alley without name, it is an alley that ceases to exist when the moon disappears, but it is an alley all the same and one that says more about Karachi than anything you’llfind on a street map.

Your mother called the other day to say she’s given you a copy of my father’s letter. In it he speaks of Karachi’s war stories that are personal in a way which excludes everything outside the story. I