Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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‘Karachi is an anagram of “hack air”.’ He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and slashed at the wind. Women in bright clothes with makeshift cloth bags full of cotton slung over their shoulders walked past and pointed towards us, giggling. I felt oddly foreign.

‘Karimazov?’

‘Just mindless violence,’ he said, snapping the blade closed. ‘Doesn’t it bother you that we’re here because our parents don’t feel we’re safe at home?’

I shrugged. Our first time away from our parents, and he had to go and do the whole concerned-citizen-of-a-city-in-turmoil bit on me. Imagine if in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the four children sat around saying, ‘We’re here because there are air-raids in London. How terrible!’ They’d never even make it up the stairs, let alone into the wardrobe, with that kind of attitude. I thought of mentioning this to Karim, but we’d decided that it was time to grow out of the Narnia books the previous year, and he might have laughed at my childishness had I invoked them. So instead I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with spending a few days in this place.’

He looked at me as though I were very stupid. ‘He thinks changing locations can alter things,’ he said.

‘He who? Your father? Well, so what? It can, can’t it? Sometimes. Depending on the things.’ I began to feel I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘But when we go back nothing will have changed.’ He tossed the claw away from him with a jerk, as though just realizing it was part of a dead animal. ‘What does he think he’s protecting me from?’

‘Bullets and bombs. Come on, Cream, it’s not so bad here.’

He turned away from me and rubbed his hands across his eyes. Probably tired from the journey, I told myself. But he’d fallen asleep before me on the train and woken up only when I woke him up. I knew I should ask him what really was the matter, not just today, but nearly every day for the last few weeks, or was it months? We were all beginning to surprise ourselves with our reactions to the world in those days, anger flaring up for no reason and solitude becoming a sought-after state in which we’d find ourselves thinking about things that formerly would have made us clump together in groups to giggle. So it would have been easy to dismiss Karim’s moments of rage towards his father as nothing more than a manifestation of adolescence, and it seemed almost everyone did dismiss it as exactly that – Sonia and Zia did, and so did my parents, and even Uncle Ali was wont to respond to Karim’s scowls with some exasperated comment about ‘boys at that age’, while Aunty Maheen sighed. But there was a gravity to Karim’s anger, a sense of cause and effect, some terrible notion of consequence. Did no one but me see that? While the rest of us were still just changing, Karim was maturing.

‘When we drove into the farm I thought I was seeing snow for the first time,’ I said, leaning forward and speaking softly into his ear as he looked out at a distant point in the cottonfields. ‘But really it’s tired clouds, coming to rest on the ground.’

He turned away from whatever he was staring at to smile at me, and encircled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. He was much smaller than I was in those days, but my wrist fitted perfectly into the ‘O’ created by his clasp. Then he cut across to the cottonfield, his feet squelching in the mud. He pulled a cotton boll out of its pod and walked back to where I was standing. ‘Here. I found you an angel in disguise.’ Sitting on the top of the cotton was a ladybird. Karim touched the cotton to my hand and the ladybird crawled off on to my palm. I wanted to hug Karim then, but was surprised to find myself imagining my breasts pressing against his chest, and so instead I just looked down at the ladybird and wondered out loud, if I touch its back will my finger come away red? The back became wings and the ladybird swooped off my hand.

There was more swooping a few hours later when Aunty Laila found Karim and me sitting at one end of the long dining table pulling faces at our reflections in the polished wood surface. ‘Darlings!’ she cried, descending upon us with arms outstretched, and coming to rest in a crouch between our intricately carved chairs. Her arms locked themselves around our necks and she pulled us close in a sudden gesture so that our faces almost bounced off her cheekbones. She pursed her Lancome-enhanced lips into kisses that were presumably intended to ricochet off the opposite wall and on to our cheeks. Ami once said that no one, least of all Aunty Laila, knew where the boundaries existed between Aunty Laila’s parody of Karachi high society and her genuine embodiment of the characteristics of a Karachi Knee.

Have I not mentioned the Knees yet? The Ghutnas, rather, in local lingo. This narrative demands tangents, but, for the moment, remain befuddled. Aunty Laila is on centre stage, and deserves her spotlight.

‘Send word back to Karachi that I am bilkul a farmer’s wife,’ she said, twirling into her chair. ‘Who needs parties? I’m happy to pick cotton and feed goats.’

‘You’re out every day with your scythe, cutting down the sugar cane,’ Karim said, his mood sufficiently improved to allow him to smile at Uncle Asif who had just entered the room.

‘Standing knee-deep in keechar to birth a buffalo,’ Aunty Laila whooped.

‘Every morning, you’re up with the cock,’ I said.

And regretted it immediately.

Karim covered his face with a napkin. Aunty Laila – beautiful, elegant, coiffed and manicured Aunty Laila – snorted with laughter. I glanced over at Uncle Asif, but he had the decency to pretend to be too engrossed in piling his plate high with food to realize what was going on. Or so I thought.

‘A history lesson,’ he said, a few seconds later, cutting through Aunty Laila’s chatter and turning his plate towards Karim and me. ‘In 1947, East and West Pakistan were created, providing a pair of testicles for the phallus of India.’ He had moulded his rice into the subcontinent.

‘Honestly, Asif,’ Aunty Laila said. ‘No genitalia in the dining room.’

I blushed. Karim crossed his legs.

‘We’re thirteen,’ I said. ‘Maybe you should wait another five years or so before having this kind of conversation in front of us.’

Aunty Laila laughed. ‘Your mothers and I became friends at the age of ten when I told them about the facts of life.’

Karim retreated behind his napkin again.

‘You needn’t act so coy.’ Aunty Laila pulled the napkin away from his face and slapped his shoulder with it. ‘Your mother told me about the magazines under your bed.’

‘They weren’t mine! Zia brought them over. I can’t believe she told…I can’t believe you’re bringing this up.’

‘So to speak,’ Aunty Laila said.

‘Look.’ Uncle Asif poured daal on to his plate. The liquid suffused and flowed off the rice. ‘The Indus flooding the land and spilling into the Arabian Sea. See, here, the Oyster Rocks and there Manora lighthouse disguised as a carrot. Look at those tributaries engorged. Jhelum, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab, and whatever that fifth one is. Guddu Barrage overflowing. See, now, I’m crumbling the Himalayas beneath my fork. Nanga Parbat goes down shrouded in lentils.’

I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, is this how people are forced to entertain themselves in Ruralistan? But Karim, when I looked at him for the raised eyebrow that would confirm our synchrony of thought, was staring down at his plate, shifting his rice around with his fork as though he, too, were trying to construct a rice-mould but the picture in his mind kept changing shape, stymieing all efforts to reconstruct it in rice.

Although, to be honest, I just made that up.

But I’m not making anything up when I recall Uncle Asif’s friend, whatshisname, the diplomat who stopped at the farm after lunch to drop off a dead quail and, before departing, shook Karim’s hand and said, ‘So you’re Ali’s son? I suppose on meeting a young man your age it’s customary to ask what you’re going to be when you grow up, but no need for that with you, is there? I expect Ali’s already preparing you to take over the linen industry. For three generations your family has kept my family’s dining tables looking so elegant.’

‘No,’ Karim said. ‘I’m not joining the family business.’

‘Oh! What, then?’

Karim looked around, saw a dribble of daal on Uncle Asif’s kameez. ‘I’m going to be a map-maker.’

. .

We were without obsessions at the time, a rare occurrence in our lives. A few months earlier it had been birds. We became buyers of bird books, spouters of bird facts (‘the hummingbird eats fifty or sixty meals a day’, ‘the Gila woodpecker lives in the desert and never sees wood, only cactus’), imitators of bird walks (moving through the world on our toes, heels in the air), though the fascination with feathered creatures was necessarily short-lived since all we could see in our gardens were crows and sparrows, and what’s the point of being bird-obsessed if you can’t bird-watch. Prior to that, we’d filled our lives with disguises. We would wander around with cotton balls lodged in our cheeks, sling towels across our shoulders under loose shirts, stick black paper over our teeth, and we even collected hair clippings from Aunty Runty’s beauty parlour and attempted to glue straight, long tresses to the ends of our own hair.

How each of our obsessions started and how they ended, and who instigated their beginnings and ends, we never remembered or cared about. But I cared deeply when Karim started pulling atlases out of Uncle Asif’s bookshelf, the day after we arrived in Rahim Yar Khan, and traced distances and routes with his index finger, without any regard or concern for my lack of interest in the relationship of one place to another.

‘You can’t be a map-maker anyway,’ I said to him one morning when I found him in Uncle Asif’s desk poring over a large map of Pakistan that had creases where it had been folded and refolded into a neat rectangle. ‘Because all the maps have been made already, right? What are you going to do? Discover a new continent and map it?’ I hoisted myself on to the desk and sat down in the ‘disputed territory’ of Jammu and Kashmir. ‘Better way to occupy yourself is to come outside and lose a game of badminton to me. Or we could walk to the dunes. Or leap around the cotton mountain.’

He took the glass of orange juice I held out to him, and gulped it down. Bits of pulp clung to the inside of the glass and to his upper lip. ‘If you had to give someone directions to Zia’s beach hut, what would you say?’

I looked out of the window. It was a beautiful day; winter sun was beckoning us outside. ‘I don’t know. I’d say, go towards the beach, and when you come to the turtle sign take a right and—’

‘No, idiot.’ He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. ‘How would you give directions to someone who didn’t know the way to the beach? Maybe someone who’d left Karachi years ago and couldn’t remember the way there any more.’

‘Oh.’ I considered this. ‘Well, I’d just say, “Don’t worry, we’ll meet somewhere and go to the beach together.”’

Karim glared at me. ‘That’s not helpful.’

I glared back at him. ‘There’s something you need to know.’

‘What?’

I lifted him up by the collar and slammed him against the chair back. ‘You hate geography!’

‘Yeah, so? Every map-maker has his quirks.’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Fine. By the way, map-makers are called cartographers.’

‘Cartographers.’ He wrote down the word, forming a circle with the letters, and we both bent our heads over the paper.

‘Go rap her carts,’ I suggested, rearranging letters in my head. ‘Strap her cargo? Crop rag hearts?’

Karim grinned. ‘Chop Ra’s garter.’

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We’re adolescents. We’re supposed to be rebellious for the sake of it. So if you just want something that has nothing to do with making linen, that’s really fine and in keeping with this stage of life and all that. But there are more interesting options than latitudes and longitudes. How about flea-trainer? Or bear-wrestler?’

‘Bare wrestler? Please! Let’s promise never to imagine each other naked. Oh, sorry, no. Too late for that.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen your baby pictures.’

I crossed my arms and gave him one of my that-is-so-pre-teen looks, attempting an air of superiority, but he waggled his ears at me in return and I couldn’t help laughing.

‘OK, but truthfully, Karim, what’s so interesting about this stuff?’ I picked up the atlas and placed it on his head; you’d never know how flat the top of his head was until you tried balancing something on it. ‘I don’t understand the fascination.’

He tilted his head forward and let the book fall on to the desk. ‘It’s like a giant jigsaw, the world. All these places connecting.’ He opened the atlas to one of the first pages, where all the continents were spread out. ‘See: Pakistan connects to Iran which connects to Turkey which connects to Bulgaria which connects to Yugoslavia which connects to Austria which connects to France. But then there’s the sea. And after that, England. It doesn’t quite connect, England.’ He stared gloomily at the page.

‘But we like seas,’ I reminded him, before either of us could start thinking about the increasing frequency of Uncle Ali’s threats to move to London. I traced a sea route with my finger from the coast of Karachi to Plymouth. ‘If it were possible to walk on the sea bed, we could step into the water at Baleji Beach and just start walking. And everyone would see us go, and we’d wave back at them and we’d carry on waving at them and walking, even when we couldn’t see them any more and just knew they were there, and we’d walk and walk and walk, and never know when we crossed out of Karachi’s water and were surrounded by some other country’s seaweed. And then, look, all of a sudden, there’s England. And maybe the sea’s colder now, but it’s still the sea, you know.’

But he wouldn’t be drawn into that vision of things. ‘Even seas have boundaries,’ he said. ‘You’d be arrested by the coastguard.’

You?

‘Can’t turn everything into a game,’ he muttered.

I swung my legs off the table, and shrugged. I wasn’t going to let him see how much that stung. ‘You started with the jigsaw puzzle.’

He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘True. Guilty. But may I say something in my defence?’

‘Nope. You are dismissed as incontinent, irreverent and immaterialistic.’ I kicked his shin. ‘Come on. Let’s go and find a nonexistent ghost.’

He saluted me, and all was forgiven. I never knew how to stay angry with Karim. We climbed out of the window and wandered to the back lawn, past the slightly sagging badminton net and towards the ancient tree that dominated the garden. Thin, ropy strands fell like veils from its outstretched limbs. A ghost lived in this tree. Ghosts appeared to live in almost all the old trees near and around the farm, but they smelled citydwellers’ disbelief emanating from both of us, and hid in protest. The least amount of courtesy you should extend to someone is acknowledgement that they exist, and Karim and I were horribly discourteous towards ghosts. The one in this tree was a nomad, but she’d stayed put here all her afterlife. She had belonged to one of the nomadic tribes that passed through the sand dunes bordering the farm – strange to look around Uncle Asif’s land and consider that such a verdant place was reclaimed desert. The people of the town didn’t mix with the nomads and whenever two peoples don’t mix with each other it means Romeo and Juliet is about to happen. And so it was with the nomad girl and a boy from the village; they were in love, they swore they would die before they allowed themselves to be parted, and before the drama could develop further she died of pneumonia, which wasn’t terribly romantic, and he married someone else, which was worse, and she had been sulking in the tree in the back yard ever since. Or, at least, that was Uncle Asif’s version of things.

‘How long do they remain nomads?’ Karim climbed from one branch to another until he was high enough to see the silver-grey dunes, less than a ten-minute walk from where we were, on which the ‘settled nomads’ had built mud huts. ‘They’ve been in one place for over twenty years now, Uncle Asif said. When do they stop being called nomads?’

I put my arms around the tree trunk, and Karim clambered on to the branch growing out of the other side of the trunk and did the same. Tree-huggers before we’d ever heard the term. The trunk so wide (or we so small?) that even the tips of our fingers didn’t reach. The sun’s rays were piercing through narrow gaps between the leaves, and it almost seemed possible to grasp a shaft of sunlight and wield it like a lightsabre. ‘Luke, I am your father,’ I rasped in my best Darth Vader impersonation. Karim jumped up from a branch and, with his feet dangling, hooked his arm over the branch above. I looked down. We weren’t very high up, but high enough that you wouldn’t want to slip. I looked down again. The branch I was standing on seemed narrower than I had thought. Narrower, and flimsier.

‘Karim, I’m stuck.’

Faster than I had thought possible, he was on the tree limb right below me, ready to climb up.

‘No,’ I yelled, when he put his hand up to take hold of the branch. ‘No, don’t. It can’t take your weight.’ I pressed my body against the tree trunk, willing it to absorb my body mass so that the branch would not give way beneath me.

‘Don’t panic,’ he said. ‘Just let go of the trunk and step back.’

I looked down again. The grass seemed to rise up towards me. Or was I falling and unaware of it? I gripped the trunk tighter. I knew I mustn’t faint whatever happened, mustn’t faint.

‘Don’t look down. Look up. Look up!’

I raised my head and looked out towards the dunes. One of the nomad women was sweeping the square of earthen ground outside the cluster of huts. Another was stirring a pot on the outdoor stove. Purple stain on the ground near the fire. Same colour as the woman’s clothes. I wanted to point out to Karim that the dye had spread in a boot-shaped pattern. Like Italy. How do you build a hut on a dune? Surely the sands must shift continually. My shirt was drenched in sweat. Would it be enough to suction me to the tree trunk when the branch broke?

‘Ra, let go of the trunk and step back.’

‘I’ll fall.’

‘You won’t fall.’

‘I’ll fall. I’ll fall and I’ll die.’ As I said it, I could see it happening. The foot stepping on air, pulling the rest of my body with it, tree limbs breaking as I plummeted down.

‘No,’ he said, his voice assured. ‘You’d never do that to me.’

I let go of the tree trunk, turned, and sat down. The branch was wide and strong. I placed my palm on the branch and pushed down with the full weight of my body. It didn’t even quiver. I could jump off the branch and I’d land in mud, entirely unharmed.

Karim touched my knee and then was gone, clambering back to the other side of the tree. I stretched out and lay down. Would it be so terrible to live here? In Karachi we never had this freedom, this space to wander in. Too dangerous to walk around, and too humid to want to walk most of the time. Besides, walk to where? Life compressed into houses and cars and private clubs and school and gardens too small to properly hide in. Zia was in Karachi, I had to remind myself. That was hardly inconsequential. I could hear Karim moving from branch to branch. We had never once talked about my feelings for Zia, and I had only realized that Karim knew how I felt when he backed up my insistence, in front of our whole gang, that there was no picture of Zia in my bedside-table drawer, despite Sonia’s claims to the contrary. He backed me up on that, even though I had started keeping the drawer under lock and key and would not tell him why. He backed me up even though Sonia was the new girl in school and she was beautiful. That had been in August, at the beginning of the term, and now Sonia and I were fast friends (‘I’m not fast; I’m fully modest,’ Sonia had said, the day I let her look in my bedside drawer again. ‘But you’re a real Carl Lewis. Except, where Zia is concerned you’re Legcramps-e-Azam’). But Karim still hadn’t said another word to me about the picture. Or was it I who hadn’t said another word to him? My eyebrows drew closer to each other. How would I feel if he had pictures of a girl in his drawer and never talked to me about it? Not good. In fact, I’d probably walk up to him and kick him hard for such an attempt at secrecy. But Karim didn’t kick. Perhaps it was because he knew that he had only to wait and I would tell him everything.

‘Hey, come and look at this,’ he called out.

Without hesitation or even the slightest lurch of fear, I walked round to the branch just below the one on which Karim was standing, and stood up on my toes, resting my chin just inches from his feet. On the tree trunk someone had written ‘Z+M’, the letters biting deep into the bark.

Zia, I stupidly thought. Who’s this ‘M’?

Karim sat down, straddling the branch, and ran his thumb through the thick grooves of the letter ‘M’. ‘Mama told me Asif was a regular member of their gang back then. They all spent one New Year here. Must have been 1970, though she didn’t tell me that part of it.’

Oh.

I looped my arm around the branch above me, and looked at my father’s flamboyant ‘Z’. He must have sat on the branch that Karim was now astride, leaning towards the tree trunk, hammer and chisel in hand. How long had it taken to gouge so deep a mark of devotion to Karim’s mother? I pulled myself up so that I was sitting just behind Karim, and reached out to cover the ‘Z’ with my palm, pressing harder until I could feel the letter leave its mark on my skin. Karim did the same with the ‘M’, our hands separated by a+.

Oh.

I couldn’t even begin to imagine them together – my father and Aunty Maheen. The only pairing that made less sense was my mother and Uncle Ali. Although perhaps it was just that I couldn’t imagine my parents and Karim’s parents as anything other than my parents and Karim’s parents.

I pulled my hand away, and then pulled Karim’s hand away. We had first heard about the fiancé swap when we were ten and our mothers told us they hadn’t mentioned it before because it might have seemed too weird. They knew, they said, how sensitive kids can be about their parents. On the contrary Karim and I saw the news as thrilling proof that our friendship was destined, and spent many hours, over the years, drawing up lists of the foibles and the talents the other possessed, under the heading ‘Those Genes Could Have Been Mine’—though for a long time we used ‘Things’ instead of ‘Genes’. Until that moment on the tree, it had never bothered me at all to consider the way things might have been, the way things once were. But that he should have chiselled the letters so deeply, my father who hated exertion, that he should have done that for someone, and for that someone to not be my mother, was nothing less than an abomination.

I scrambled off the branch. ‘Come on,’ I said to Karim. ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ But he stayed where he was, running his fingers over the letters, again and again. ‘Stop it,’ I called out from the base of the tree. ‘Stop doing that.’ But he ignored me, and I could not stay to argue for the queasiness in my stomach.

. .

Uncle Chaperoo was supposed to accompany us back to Karachi when our three weeks in RYK were up, but he decided to elope instead. At least, that’s what he wanted everyone to believe, but Uncle Asif saw things a little differently. I was having tea with Uncle Asif in front of the fireplace when Uncle Chaperoo called with the news, and Uncle Asif put the call on his newly acquired speaker-phone.

‘Bhai, Umber and I have eloped,’ Uncle Chaperoo said.

‘What? You’ve married her! Wonderful. And about time.’

‘We’ve eloped!’

‘Let me speak to her. I want to welcome her to the family.’

‘We love each other. We don’t care what anyone else says.’

‘Excellent. Where’s the honeymoon? When you return we’ll throw a huge reception for the two of you.’

‘We’re prepared to live on love!’

‘I’ll get Laila on the line right away. She’ll be so happy.’

‘We’ve eloped, damn you!’

Uncle Asif hung up, and shook his head. ‘Such assumptions, such assumptions! From my own brother.’ He threw another log on to the fire and watched the sparks fly. ‘At a time like this, Raheen, should I care about anything other than whether he’s happy? Have I not always said that I wish to be the most unfeudal feudal in this country?’

‘You don’t seem very decadent to me,’ I said by way of comfort. ‘Though it’s true you live in luxury and don’t seem to spend a lot of time doing anything that looks even a little bit like work.’ I tilted my head and looked at him sideways. ‘I could see you lying on a couch in a toga, eating peeled grapes. Uncle Ali said that’s the real definition of decadence.’

He threw back his head and laughed. ‘You are your father’s daughter, aren’t you? It requires a certain genetic disposition to say something like that at the age of thirteen and yet manage to be utterly charming.’

‘I’m not the charming one,’ I said, putting my feet up on the coffee table. ‘That’s Karim. He’s got natural charm. I mean, you see him across a room and you know you’ll like him.’

‘And you?’ Uncle Ali said. ‘What do people think when they see you across a room?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘But usually if I’m in a room I’m with Karim, Sonia, Zia. One or all of them. And then you’d notice Sonia, because she’s gorgeous, and you’d notice Zia because he’s completely cool, and you’d notice Karim because you can’t help but notice Karim. Me, I guess you’d notice that all three of them choose to be my friends. And that must say something.’ It was true; I knew quite well that there was nothing remarkable about me. This is not to say I suffered insecurities because of everything I lacked. There wasn’t a great deal that I did lack. I was intelligent enough, attractive enough, witty enough, cool enough. On sports day I won silver medals and even, occasionally, a gold; in school concerts I got speaking parts rather than being relegated to ‘a rock’ or ‘crowd scene’; when teams were picked for anything, anything at all, I was never, ever, the last to be chosen; I knew all the words to all the songs on Whaml’s ‘Make It Big’ album, and had been the one to inform a group of sixteen-year-olds that the line from ‘Wake Me Up’ was not ‘You make the sun shine brighter than the darkest day’, which made no sense at all, but rather ‘You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day’. I could do a dead-on imitation of Qabacha from ‘Tanhaiyan’; Qadir, not Imran, was my favourite bowler. And perhaps all this might have meant that I was remarkable for being a perfect blend of admirable traits, except for the fact that there were other things blended in, colder things. I didn’t know how to embrace the world, the way Karim did; I didn’t know how to make strangers feel at home, the way Sonia did; and I didn’t know how to embody a loyalty so fierce it meant putting myself at risk for others in any fight, even the fights that seemed absurd, the way Zia did.

‘Hmmm…’ Uncle Asif stared down at his toes and made them wiggle. ‘But I notice you, even when there’s no one else around.’

I smiled at him. ‘That’s because I really like you, and you know it.’

‘Ah, there’s that charm again.’ He picked up a poker and smiled at me. ‘I liked all my parents’ friends when I was your age. Then I grew up and began to understand what kind of people they were and, you know, a lot of them just weren’t very nice. Maybe one day, when you’re old enough to see beneath the smiling veneer, you won’t like me any more.’

Unsure if he was serious or not, I curled on to the sofa and looked at the framed black-and-white photograph on the coffee table of Uncle Asif baring his teeth in half-grimace, half-leer, at a camel which had pushed its snout to within inches of his face. ‘Doubt it,’ I said.

He waved the poker in my direction. ‘An aphorism from the middle-aged to the extremely youthful: you can only know how you feel in the here and now, not how you’ll feel years, months or even days down the line.’

The tree carving hadn’t been far from my mind since I’d seen it; the memory of it gave rise to an uneasiness in my stomach. ‘Why didn’t my father marry Karim’s mother?’

Uncle Asif turned away and poked the fire with vigour. Sparks flew up and leapt over the grate. ‘That’s not my story to tell.’

‘In other words,’ I said to Karim later that night, as I sat in the bay seat of his bedroom window, ‘there is a story there.’

He nodded and brought two bowls over to the window from his bedside, liquid sloshing against the sides as he walked. Green dye in one and purple in the other. ‘I got them from one of the nomad boys. In exchange for my marbles. Because green and purple seemed like map colours. But now I don’t know what to do with them.’

I looked down at the ceramic bowls uneasily. I had the strong suspicion they were expensive items of art; I had a stronger suspicion the dye might not wash off very easily. ‘Good you got rid of the marbles. They were beginning to give me the creeps.’ They really were. They looked too much like the eyes of the nomads’ mad goat with its twisted horns that resembled dried leaves curling in on themselves.

Karim tore a piece of paper out of a legal pad and sat down across from me. Jackals howled in the distance. I dipped my hand in green dye and pressed it against the paper. Karim dipped his hand in purple dye and pressed it over my palm print. Karim’s hand was smaller but his fingers were broader. Some of the lines of our hands ran together for a while in purple – green, then veered off in different directions. I half-expected the letters ‘Z’ and ‘M’ to appear on the paper.

‘How do you think it happened?’ he asked.

‘I think the mad goat’s father came untethered and chased your mother around the dunes, and your father came by and saved her. And over on the other side of the farm a crazy bull was chasing my father and my mother waved her red sari at it to make it change course and, olé! Love swap!’