Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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In the days and years after that, the term Ghutna became a euphemism used both as an adjective to describe a particularly social social ‘do’ and a noun to refer to the people who threw themselves into the socializing. For instance, ‘And how was last night’s party? Was it a Ghutna evening?’ my mother might ask one of her friends.

‘Oh, the Ghutnas were out in full force. Falling and peeling, falling and peeling, scrambling up the social ladder and falling and peeling. I tell you, the place was just awash with blood.’

‘And how are your own knees?’

‘Raw, darling, raw.’

Karim and I always encouraged our parents to go to as many par ties as they could bear. We loved the morning-after parodies. But best of all were parties thrown by his parents or mine, because then we could watch the absurdity up close and, between laughs, pause to admire the elegance and the aplomb of it all while itching to grow up and have lives just like our parents’ lives. The first time I reconsidered that aspiration was at the party my parents threw the day Karim and I got back from Rahim Yar Khan.

Karim and his parents were the first to arrive, both Aunty Maheen and Karim carrying buckets of roses. ‘They were just so beautiful,’ Aunty Maheen cried out, as she ascended the stairs to the ‘upstairs study’, where my mother was trying to unwind after the hectic party preparations and my father was gamely attempting to aid the process by playing ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ on the hand-held, battery-powered organ he’d given me for my birthday. I was sitting on the arm of his chair, pulling each of his ear lobes in turn in time to the beat.

‘And absurdly cheap,’ Aunty Maheen continued, stepping into the room. ‘So I bought them, buckets and all, from the phoolwalla by the roundabout.’ She bent to place a bucket on the ground, and Uncle Ali whisked it out of her hand.

‘Maheen, the bottom’s muddy. You’ll ruin the carpet.’ He placed it outside on the marble floor, gesturing Karim to do the same with his bucket.

‘Muddy bottom,’ my father sang, plunking out the tune of ‘Stormy Weather’.

‘They’re gorgeous, Maheen. Thanks,’ Ami said. ‘Ali, don’t stand there looking cross. Pour yourself a drink. I refuse to start hosting duties until the actual guests arrive.’

Uncle Ali looked at the glass table in the centre of the room, with its vase overspilling with flowers, and frowned. ‘You don’t have nearly enough vases for that absurd amount of roses, do you?’

‘Who needs vases?’ My mother stood up, leaned outside and plucked a rose from the bucket. ‘We’ll make everyone do the tango.’ She held the rose up horizontally. ‘Like in Some Like It Hot.’ She snipped off the thorns with Aba’s pocketknife, and held the rose to Uncle Ali’s mouth. For a moment he continued glaring and then, snap, his teeth closed around the rose stem.

‘Olé!’ Karim and I shouted.

‘Duet, duet,’ Aunty Maheen said, and sat down next to my father. ‘One, two, three.’ With more regard for volume than tune, they started bashing out ‘Chopsticks’ on the organ, while Ami and Uncle Ali twirled around the room in dance, Uncle Ali’s feet nimbly avoiding the perils of dancing with a sari. The rose transferred itself from Uncle Ali’s mouth to my mother’s just as the tune ended, even though their cheeks didn’t ever quite touch as they danced.

‘Encore, encore,’ Karim said when they finished.

‘Absolutely not.’ Ami collapsed on the sofa and slumped against Aba’s shoulder. ‘I’m exhausted. You’re married to an old hag, Zaf.’ She tucked the rose behind my father’s ear.

‘I’ve got the old hag on my hands,’ Aba sang.

Aunty Maheen handed my mother the discarded thorns from the ashtray, and Ami jabbed Aba’s neck with them. Uncle Ali cheered her on.

My analysis of the photograph at Ali and Maheen’s wedding was clearly embarrassingly out of step with reality. I looked at my father’s hands. Perilously close to being ‘delicate ‘. Some other M, some other Z. Had to be. And if not, so what? Really, so what?

When the doorbell rang to signal the ‘actual guests’ had started to arrive, Ami said, ‘Oh, can’t we ignore them?’ and I held my breath, hoping she would. But, of course, even as she said that she was already walking towards the door, stopping first to check with Aunty Maheen that the rose exchange hadn’t smudged her lipstick.

Karim and I spent the next half-hour finding vases in different rooms and cupboards, and stuffing them full of roses. In between arranging roses, we did hors-d ‘œuvres twirls around the room, and by the time the first plate of devilled eggs was consumed everyone had arrived.

It wasn’t a particularly large party, as Karachi parties go. Fifty people, or thereabouts, almost all of whom had known my parents longer than I had. Designer shalwar-kameezes were still relatively new in Karachi, but I’m quite sure that by then we were past those ini tial days of designer fever, when every experiment possible with form had been tried on the generic shalwar-kameez, resulting in such absurdities as the dhoti shalwar and the butterfly shalwar – but, let’s admit it now, to those of us who had never known the swinging days of Karachi in the sixties there was an exuberance, a delight, in that revival of fashion right under the nose of the quasi-fundamentalist military government.

Though I don’t remember specifics about anyone’s attire at the party it’s safe to say that the person most expensively (though not necessarily most tastefully) dressed was Aunty Runty – Primo Ghutna, as Aunty Laila had once called her. Even while my parents had laughed at that remark, something in the way my father slid his glance around to me said that Aunty Laila was taking the easy option of parody. Easy to laugh at Aunty Runty; far harder to look at her and see, as my mother once said, ‘a woman from whom loveliness has fled’. You only had to look at her once, and then look at photographs of her before she married, to know the difference between beauty and loveliness. For Aunty Runty, as long as I can remember and I can remember only after her marriage, has as much beauty as money can buy, with more than a little help from her genes, but there is something blasted and hollow about that beauty. When I was at university, a friend showed me a videotape of thousands and thousands of lights strung beneath a velvet-black starry sky; I murmured, ‘Beautiful, that’s so beautiful,’ only to hear her say, ‘Those are the lights of refugee camps,’ and as I recoiled from the TV image I thought of Aunty Runty.

But back in 1987 refugees were still, to me, little more than a hassle that streamed across the Afghan border with guns and drugs, and Aunty Runty was a figure of fun as she sashayed her way across my parents’ living room and clutched my arm. ‘Raheenie, sweetie, why haven’t you wished me a happy, happy, ’87 yet?’

‘Nappy Yew Hear,’ I said, but it was lost on her.

‘Now, darling…’ Her voice lowered to a whisper. ‘Tell all about Asif’s brother’s elopement. You were there, no?’

‘Nothing to tell. Uncle Asif was very happy when he heard about it.’

Aunty Runty lowered her voice further. ‘It’s OK, you can trust me. Here…’ She fumbled in her bag and pulled out a tube of lipstick. ‘Boys will die for this colour. Take it, go on. Sign of friendship.’

I put my hands up and backed away. ‘No, really, thank you.’ I looked at the bright red stick that she was swivelling up and down before my eyes as though she intended to hypnotize me with it. ‘I’m telling the truth. I was with Uncle Asif when his brother called, and he put it on speaker-phone, so I heard everything, and, really, he was very happy. Planning celebration parties.’

Aunty Runty looked over my shoulder at the mirror and applied a layer of lipstick to her mouth. The previous layer was on the rim of a whisky glass, as was the layer before that and the one before that and the one before that. ‘Clever man, Asif,’ she said. ‘He knew we’d ask you what happened, so he put the call on speaker-phone and pretended he was happy.’ She popped the lipstick back in her bag and snapped the clasp closed.

‘Why shouldn’t he be happy?’ I couldn’t help asking.

‘The girl’s a Shi’a.’ When I looked confused, she added: ‘Asif’s Sunni.’

‘Yes, but Uncle Asif doesn’t seem religious.’

Aunty Runty laughed. ‘What’s that got to do with it? Everyone wants everyone in their family to marry same to same.’ She looked across at her husband, the ghastly Bunty. ‘And that doesn’t mean same tastes in movies and books, OK. Just how they look on paper. The background. Class, sect, ethnic group: that’s what a family looks at when considering who they are willing to be related to through marriage.’ For a moment I thought I saw something in her that allowed me to understand how she and my mother had ever been friends, and then it was gone, and she said, ‘Though, of course, that worked out for your parents.’ She inclined her head to where Ami stood with her hand on Aba’s shoulder, talking to Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen. ‘And Maheen no longer seems to mind that your father didn’t want to marry her because she’s Bengali. Although, I have to say, I was appalled when I first heard the engagement was broken. I said to your father, she’s not even that dark, Zafar. Many people can’t even tell where she’s from.’

What an idiot, I thought. Does she really expect me to take her seriously?

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I have to help Karim with the hors-d’œuvres.’

‘With Karim, you can’t tell at all. That he’s half-Bengali. Never guess it. But let’s see – if one day you decide your friend Karim is husband material, what will Daddy say to that?’

‘Daddy just wants me to be happy,’ I said, and left her to her whisky.

‘She’s such a bitch,’ I said, when I reached Karim.

‘Raheen!’

‘Well, she is. But I’m not going to tell you what she said, because it’ll make you sick.’ It was making me sick even though I knew it to be a lie. What prompted people to make up this kind of story? I looked around the room and, for a moment, for the first time, the room divided into two before my eyes, and in one group were people who were at the party because they were my parents’ friends, and in the other group were people who were there because they wanted to drink, and they wanted to be seen, and they wanted most of all not to have to sit at home with themselves.

‘Ali, yaar, Ali, mate, there you are.’ Aunty Runty’s husband slapped Uncle Ali on the back. ‘Hear you’re thinking of khisko-ing from the country, packing up in Paki-land.’

Beside me, Karim went very still.

Uncle Ali shrugged. ‘Just a thought, Bunty. Nothing decided.’

‘Oh, what’s to think about? The place is going to hell. Might as well get out. And when you do, I’m buying your house. Don’t even think of showing it to someone else, OK, mate?’

‘Outside,’ Karim said. We slipped past the guests to the garden and hoisted ourselves on to the boundary wall. I was content to sit on the wall, cross-legged, looking out at the pye-dogs padding across the quiet side street, but Karim stood up so that he could look down to the sea. It was too dark for him to see all the way to Clifton Beach, but he liked to believe he could discern tremors in the distant darkness, signifying waves.

‘He’s not really serious, Karimazov. He’ll never leave Karachi. It’s just talk. I mean, what would he do without my parents around? What would they do? Your parents without my parents is like…it’s like…me and Zia and Sonia without you.’ What I’d really meant was ‘It’s like me without you’ but somehow it came out differently.

‘I’ve already started thinking of Karachi as a place that I have to say goodbye to; every day I say goodbye to some part of it and then two days later I see that part again and I feel so relieved but also not, because then I have to say goodbye to it again. This must be what dying is like.’

That boy could really spoil the mood of an evening.

To change the subject I said, ‘Aunty Runty says Aba didn’t marry your mother because she’s Bengali.’

Karim sat down. ‘Well, it was 1971.’

‘So?’

‘The year of the Civil War. East Pakistan became Bangladesh.’

‘Thanks for the history lesson. What are you trying to say about my father?’

Karim shrugged. ‘Nothing. But of course people must have assumed that the ethnic thing was a factor.’

He’s a muhajir.

He’s not Bengali, he’s not.

I wrapped my arms tight against my chest. ‘Do you believe that?’

Karim pulled a leaf off a guava tree and bit off its tip. ‘No.’

‘Why are you eating a leaf?’

‘I’m saying goodbye to it.’

He handed me the leaf. I looked down at the severed veins and ran my finger along Karim’s tooth marks. ‘It’s easy to leave a leaf, Cream. How do you eat your roots?’

He put his arm around me as he hadn’t done since we were very young and not yet self-conscious about his boyarm and my girlshoulder. Spine to spine and foot to foot was fine, but this embrace we’d both cut out of our lives as soon as we were old enough to get embarrassed by the silliness of our peers and our elders who said: ‘Oh, boyfriend girlfriend! Early starters, haina?’

He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn’t say a word.

. .

‘Do you really think your father will decide you should move to London?’

It was break time, a few weeks into the start of the school term, and Sonia, Zia and Karim were sitting in our favourite spot, on the cement ground by the flagpole in the front yard, eating chilli chips. I had wandered off for a few minutes to find out from my house captain how soon netball practice would start – typically the netball season was in December, but because of the trouble in the city at the end of the previous year our entire sports calendar had been thrown into disarray. (‘And they say the elite aren’t affected by what’s happening in the city,’ I’d quipped to Karim a few weeks earlier when I found out Softball had been cancelled altogether and my pitching arm would have to languish in mothballs until the following year; because he knew I was just trying to get his hackles up he calmly slid a piece of ice down the back of my shirt and paid my comment no further attention.) When I returned to join Sonia and the two boys, I found they’d somehow strayed on to that unmentionable matter of Uncle Ali’s immigration plans.

‘Of course he won’t.’ I answered Sonia before Karim could say anything. At that moment I believed it. The world was a joyful place that break-time because, minutes earlier, Zia had taken my dupatta off my shoulder where it hung like a limp rag and tied it on the sleeve of his blue blazer as an arm-band. Two evenings earlier we’d watched some awful adaptation of the Arthurian legends on TV – surely as he (with an air of absent-mindedness) knotted the dupatta above his elbow he must have thought of a knight wearing his true love’s handkerchief into battle as a sign of her favour.

‘Let’s not even think about it,’ Karim said, looking past us to the bowler charging down the concrete pitch of the playing field, his Imranesque run-up undisturbed by a football shooting past him from one of the competing games on the field. ‘Things are better now than they were a few weeks ago, right? Maybe it’ll keep getting better.’

Zia and I nodded, but Sonia shook her head. ‘We don’t know half the things that go on. My father won’t let my mother go and visit all our relatives in other parts of town. He says there’s too much they’ll expect us to do, there’s too little we can do or say without flaunting.’ None of us knew what to say to that, and we all looked at one another uncomfortably, until Sonia relieved the moment of its awkwardness by speaking again. ‘But if you do. Move to London, I mean.’

‘Yes?’ Karim prompted her.

‘Well, it’s just that, if you meet the Queen.’

‘The Queen?’ I said.

‘Yes, the Queen. Will you ask her something for me?’

‘Sonia.’ Karim laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’m not going to meet the Queen.’

‘How do you know? Last year my neighbour was there. In London. Just walking in Hyde Park, taking a short cut from somewhere to somewhere else and she met Amitabh Bachhan. And’—triumphantly—‘he’s not even English.’

‘What!’ Zia stood up and yelled, loudly enough to make a cat leap out of the bushes around the flagpole and scamper across the yard into the shade of the stone colonial building that housed our school: ‘Amitabh Bachhan isn’t English!’

The principal, who was English, as English as only an Englishman in Pakistan can be, walked past with a baleful look in Zia’s direction. Zia saluted him and sat down.

‘Ok, so, Sonia, what do you want me ask the Queen?’

‘I just want to know if she got really depressed when they aged her on the coins.’

Zia, Karim and I laughed, and if Zia looked at Sonia in a way that neither Karim nor I looked at Sonia, I was simply too happy or too oblivious to notice it. Secret passions lurked in the breast of my boy Zia, but I was stupid enough to mistake the dupatta on his sleeve for his heart.

To sum up our little love triangle: I had a crush on Zia and Zia had a crush on Sonia and Sonia worried about hell. Hell is being a teenager worrying about hell, but Sonia exercised a steely grip on anything resembling a hormone and choked the life out of it. Once, soon after we had become friends, I tried convincing her to let her imagination run wild with some guy, any guy – there had to be someone out there – and she just smiled that wicked smile of hers that undercut her every dutiful utterance and said, ‘When you know you’re going to have an arranged marriage, you start preparing early on. I’m a lot happier than you, have you noticed?’

‘So what do you think about to make yourself happy while I’m sitting here getting so blue I’m purple over Zia?’

‘Heaven.’ And then she looked so pious I knew she was joking.

Sonia was, we used to say, ‘from a conservative family’. Or, at least, that’s how Karim used to put it, though Zia was more apt to say, ‘They’re just not like us, yaar, though Sonia’s got potential.’ Conservative or not-like-us, put it however you want. The fact was, Sonia couldn’t go to parties if boys were going to be there; she couldn’t sit alone in a car with a boy for even a second, which is why Zia would always pick me up before picking her up even though that made no logistical sense; she couldn’t speak to boys on the telephone unless the door was open and her parents could hear everything. There were plenty of girls at school with me who had much the same restrictions, but Sonia’s family was the most ‘not like us’ of all because none of our parents knew her parents, none of our cousins were married to her cousins, none of our uncles had done business with her uncles. So naturally everyone concluded that it was shady, very shady, dealings that had enabled her father to move his family to the poshest part of town, enrol his daughter in the most elite school in the nation, and install those gold taps in his bathroom.

Zia was particularly scathing about the gold taps. And about the general décor of Sonia’s house. ‘Let’s go over to Horror House,’ he’d often say. ‘I feel like a laugh. Let’s go and see the latest acquisitions. What will they think of next? Leopard-print cushion covers made of real leopard skin? A reproduction of the Sistine Chapel ceiling? Diamond-encrusted calligraphy on the nameplate, with an armed guard employed to shoot on sight anyone who ventures too close to it? Any and all of the above are possible when there’s enough money to buy everything except good taste. Come on, Raheen!’ He never just said, ‘Let’s go and visit Sonia,’ so perhaps I should have seen how hard he was trying to cover up his desire for her company, but I didn’t. I didn’t see anything at all in those days, least of all how strong a part Sonia’s conservatism played in my friendship with her. If she had been willing to entertain romantic notions, surely she would have entertained them about Zia, and how would I have forgiven her that?

We were still laughing when someone called out my name. It was the fast bowler who had remained unfazed by the football. ‘You want anything from the tuck shop, Raheen?’ he called out. I had known him all my life; his parents used to live next door to us. But he was two years older than I, and when he entered the Senior School and I was left behind in the Junior School he’d stopped acknowledging my presence. Among some of my classmates, he was something of a heart-throb. Too surprised by this turnaround after four years of silence to decide whether I wanted another Coke or packet of chilli chips, I just shook my head and raised my hand in a gesture that might have been a ‘thank you’.

Sonia poked me in the ribs. ‘What was that?’

I shrugged. Zia was struggling back into his blazer, flipping up the collar and then smoothing it back down again. Nothing like a fifteen-year-old fast bowler to make a thirteen-year-old look like a novice in the game of cool. I had to bite back the urge to say to Zia, ‘Oh, just give up.’

‘I think he likes you,’ Sonia whispered. The fast bowler had turned round to look at me again, and I swear he winked. ‘He’s really cute.’

I didn’t agree with that latter assessment at all, but Zia was not looking happy so I said, with all the casualness at my disposal, ‘Maybe I’ll go out with him.’

‘What?’ Karim turned to me. ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

‘What’s your problem?’ I said. He had turned quite red.

‘He’s right, though. It would be really dumb to go out with that guy,’ Zia said. I almost didn’t hear him; I was too busy trying to figure out what was making Karim so upset. Surely he knew I was joking? And if he didn’t, that still didn’t explain his attitude.

‘He doesn’t respect girls.’ Karim was sounding positively huffy.

‘Respect isn’t what I want from him.’ I tried to smile in a knowing way.

‘Shut up, Raheen,’ Karim shouted.

‘Oho!’ Sonia put a hand on both our wrists. ‘Raheen’s not that kind of girl, Karim. Don’t worry about her.’

‘What kind of girl am I not?’

‘The kind of girl Betty is,’ Zia said.

‘Huh?’ The three of us turned to stare at him.

‘Yeah,’ Zia said. He had tied my dupatta into a bandanna around his forehead, and was lying back on his elbow, lord of all he surveyed. ‘Betty who I met in London last summer. I didn’t mention it before because, you know, I do respect girls. I don’t kiss-and-tell.’

‘That’s because you don’t kiss,’ Karim said. ‘Where did this Betty suddenly come from?’

Zia raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t get jealous, Karim. She was this girl I met last summer in London. We…well, a gentleman doesn’t talk about that kind of stuff.’

He was really such a terrible liar that I couldn’t even begin to feel jealous. Or was it that I didn’t even begin to feel jealous and decided that was because he was a terrible liar?

‘Zia!’ Sonia said, appalled.

‘Oh, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish.’ Karim started laughing. ‘OK, go on, describe her to us. What colour was her hair?’

‘Golden.’

Karim and I shrieked with laughter. ‘You could at least—’ I said, and burst into laughter again.

‘—At least say blonde,’ Karim finished.

Sonia scrunched up her face and looked from Zia to Karim and me. ‘Blonde Betty? Archie comics?’

‘Archie comics!’ Karim was bent double, his face almost touching my knee. ‘Show some originality, man.’

Zia stood up, and flung my dupatta to the ground.

‘Oh hey, Zia, come on,’ Karim said. ‘We’re just joking around. Sit down, yaar, come on.’

Zia was looking at Sonia. I was looking at Zia and trying not to notice that I thought he was being ridiculous.

‘Don’t be angry,’ Sonia reached a hand out and lightly touched his sleeve. ‘I’m sure there really are blonde Bettys in London. Aren’t there?’ She turned to Karim and me, a fierce look on her face, daring us to contradict her.

Karim and I nodded. Karim nodded a little more fervently than I did. The bell rang, and so Zia was saved from having to decide whether to sit down again or not. Karim held out a hand, and Zia pulled him up. Karim turned towards me, and I started to hold my hand out to him, but found I was turning the gesture into something else, pretending I was only reaching up to pat the top of my own head. Sonia stood up and pulled me up, and we walked towards the school building, Sonia’s arm around me, and the two boys close in conversation, a gap between them and us that seemed right somehow, seemed comfortable, and at the same time was quite new.

If Karim moved to London, would he meet Blonde Bettys?

. .

It was probably soon after that conversation in the school yard that Zia called me up, late one evening, proposing a visit to Sonia’s.

‘I can’t,’ I said, rather feebly. ‘There’s school tomorrow and it’s already after ten.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Your parents are at Runty and Bunty’s beach party, aren’t they? Mine are too. And, guess what, so are Sonia’s parents. Aunty Runty told Mummy this morning that Bunty had invited them; he’s such a loser, he’ll invite anyone with a bank balance that goes into seven digits. OK, eight digits maybe.’

‘I suppose I could call my parents and ask them…’

‘Raheen! There aren’t any phones at the beach. Besides, even if there were, you know your parents would say no. Come on, sneak out. Just once. I’ll have you back within an hour.’

‘Well…’

‘I’ve got my neighbours’ Merc.’

‘What do you mean you’ve got it?’

‘I have the keys. They’re out of town for the next few days.’

‘And they gave you the keys?’

‘Details, details. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Call Karim. Tell him we ’11 be at his place in thirteen minutes and tell Sonia we’ll be there in eighteen.’

I dialled Karim’s number and hung up after one ring. Then I did the same with Sonia’s number. When Zia walked into my room, twirling unfamiliar car-keys, I said, ‘Called the other two but no one answered their phones. I think Karim’s at his cousin’s place and maybe Sonia’s gone to sleep already.’

‘We’ll stop at her place to check.’

Oh, great.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is going to be the ride of your life.’

He really did have his neighbour’s Mercedes. It was red and it was cool. ‘Wow!’ I said out loud, forgetting that I had to be as quiet as possible so that none of the servants would know I was leaving and report me to my parents the next day.

Zia winked and flipped up the collar of his shirt. He opened the passenger side door for me and then slid across the bonnet to the driver’s side. I thought I would faint with delirium.

We took the long route to Sonia’s house via back roads, Zia gunning the engine for all it was worth. In those days that part of Defence was still comparatively uninhabited, so the back roads at night were deserted and Zia zigzagged from one side of the road to the other, weaving between street lamps, pretending to be out of control. I felt crazy enough to say or do anything, even to say, ‘How’s this for an idea, Zee? You and me. Is that an idea or is that an idea?’ and I probably would have, except that the music was blaring too loudly, Springsteen singing ‘No Surrender’ and Zia lip-synching along, banging his palm against the steering wheel. When I hear that song today I’m almost-fourteen again and back in that car and nothing in the world is impossible except a broken heart.

We drove into a pitch-dark street and I said, ‘Electricity’s gone; yes, bye-bye, bijli.’ A repair truck from the Karachi Electricity Supply Corporation rolled up and Zia said, ‘KESC to the rescue… Oh, I know which song we have to listen to.’ He rewound the tape all the way to the beginning and Status Quo’s ‘In the Army Now’ blared through the speakers. ‘Sing, girl,’ he said, and together we drowned out Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi’s voices: ‘Bijli fails in the dead of night/Won’t help to call “I need a light”/You’re in Karachi now/Oh, oh, you’re in Karachi now.’

Volume turned up all the way, despite the fact we were now in a built-up residential neighbourhood with our windows wide open, we serenaded the streets: ‘Night is falling and you just can’t see/Is this illusion or KESC/You’re in Karachi now.’

We didn’t even hear the first shot. If Zia hadn’t turned to look at me and seen through my window the gunman run out on to the street…

But he did. He yelled, ‘Duck,’ pushed me down, my hand on the volume knob jerked in surprise, the music disappeared, the rat-tat-tat-tat against the car, Zia so low in his seat he can’t possibly see out of the windscreen, his foot on the accelerator, we fly over a speed bump, bang my head on the glove box, a thump against the front of the car, Zia mutters, ‘Cat. Has to be. Cat.’ I don’t even look to check, he’s zigzagging, taking turns so fast I swear all four wheels leave the ground. ‘He was on foot, Zia, on foot,’ I scream, but I’m still huddled, sweat all over, and finally he stops. ‘We’re OK,’ he says. ‘We’re OK.’

He stepped out of the car before I did. We were on the main road, under a street light. A house a few doors down was festooned with fairy lights; the wedding season was at its height. The gate was wide open and girls holding rose garlands stood near the entrance, waiting for the imminent arrival of the baaraat. Music spilled out over the walls. He Jamalo. If we walked into that house we’d probably recognize someone there. But how would I explain being out with Zia, alone, at this hour? I tried to open the door but it was stuck, so I rolled down the window in time to see Zia in front of the car, wiping something off the mudguard. He held up his palm, plastered with bloodied fur. ‘Cat,’ he said. ‘Told you. A silly-billy cat.’ We both started laughing. I was half-in, half-out, of the car window, and as my hysteria grew I slapped my palm against the exterior of the door and felt something sharp bite into my skin.

‘Zia, come here.’ I slid out of the window, found my legs weren’t working properly and sat down hard on the street. A wavy line of bullet holes ran all the way across the front and back door, just centimetres below the window. I bent forward at the waist and touched the tip of my finger to the jagged metal that marked a bullet’s point of entrance. Hot. I jerked my finger away. What that thing could do to flesh. How my body would convulse. Thrown forward into the windshield. No pain, just burning. Seared.