Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

‘If one of those bullets had been aimed just a few inches higher…’

‘Oh, shut up, Ali,’ Ami said so sharply that I knew she’d been thinking the same thing. ‘I hate it when you do this sort of thing. Just drink your tea and think calming thoughts. Think of dry-cleaning.’

Karim and I had got up and walked out by now, and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen must have seen us close the door and assumed we’d walked immediately away, away and out of hearing, but we hadn’t because the string of my garnet necklace broke and Karim and I went down on hands and knees outside the TV room to pick up the fallen stones.

‘Not this time, Yasmin,’ Uncle Ali replied. ‘Look, I know you don’t want to think about it, but you’ve got to. This little incident has made up my mind, I’ll tell you that. We’re migrating.’ At Aunty Maheen’s noise of disbelief, he added, ‘At least, I am. And I’m taking Karim with me.’

Karim’s hand closed around a handful of garnets. My hand closed around Karim’s wrist.

Aunty Maheen said, ‘Ali, when did you become this person?’

‘Stop it now, both of you,’ Ami said.

But they didn’t. ‘I’ve become my reflection, dear wife. I’ve become the man I’ve seen reflected in your eyes for so long.’

‘Ali, don’t,’ Aba pleaded. ‘It’s been a tense evening; best not to speak. We’ll only say things we regret.’

‘Regret is an emotion,’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘It doesn’t apply to him.’

I tried pulling Karim away, but he shook me off. ‘Karimazov, come on. Let’s go to my room. You don’t want to hear this.’

While I was speaking I drowned out whatever it was that my father said, but after Karim pushed me away again, the heel of his palm shoving my shoulder, we both heard Aunty Maheen’s response. ‘Please, Zafar. Don’t you, of all people, try to tell me that feelings can’t change. How dare you be the one to say that to me.’

Sometimes you hear the voices of people whose every cadence you think you know by heart. By heart. But then sounds emerge from their throats, sounds that you want to believe cannot belong to them, but it’s worse than that because you know that they do; you hear the sound and you know that this grating cacophony belongs to them as much as does the music in their voices when they call you by nicknames that should sound utterly silly but instead are transformed by affection into something to cherish. I heard Aunty Maheen turn on my father, and I knew that one day, not today perhaps, not even next year, but one day people more familiar to me than the smell of sea air would become strangers and I would become a stranger to them.

‘The kids are still outside,’ Ami said, and Karim and I turned and ran into my room.

‘Now we’ll listen to music and say nothing.’ Karim headed straight for my stereo without waiting for a response. He popped in one of my parents’ tapes and pressed play and the room filled with the morose sounds of ‘Seasons in the Sun’. Karim switched off the music and pulled a jigsaw puzzle out of my desk drawer. ‘Let’s assemble.’

He was so much his father’s son, though I’d never seen that before (and maybe I didn’t even see it quite then, but play along, play along). Both of them sought desperately for the imposition of order in their lives, though how anyone as adept at anagrams as Karim could fail to see the arbitrariness of order I’ll never understand. I finally was ready to say, ‘Let’s talk, Karim,’ but he was already placing all the border pieces into one pile and sorting the rest into piles of co-ordinating colour.

‘You’re putting the sky in the sea,’ I said. ‘And I think that branch is really an antler.’

He sat back and tapped his ankle bone, visible between jeans and sneakers. ‘Where does that road go?’ he asked.

I looked at the cover of the jigsaw box. ‘What road? You mean this path?’

‘No, the main road that cuts past the Sheikh’s palace. Near where you were shot at. Khayaban-e-Shaheen. Where does it go? Does it keep going on to the sea?’

‘Who knows?’

We heard his parents’ voices rise up in anger from the study. I tapped Karim’s clenched fist and when he didn’t respond I prised open his fingers. He could become a hermit, I thought. I could see him alone on a mountain, spending hours observing his fingers’ ability to flex and unflex, and tracing the bones that connected thumb to ankle in the jigsaw of his body. I shook my head. Karim on a mountain? He was such a city boy.

He looked up, suddenly concerned. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Me?’

‘You were shot at.’

‘Oh, yes.’ I let go of his hand and sat back. Already that memory was fading, and I had started anticipating the social cachet I could enjoy in the school yard from having a story like tonight’s under my belt. ‘It’s over,’ I said.

He looked at me and shook his head. ‘But the world is slightly different now, isn’t it?’

They cannot protect you from this. And what else?

‘Not as safe.’ Inexplicably, I started crying. I drew my knees up against my chest, and looked down at the carpet. Tears landed on my jeans and sank into the fabric.

Karim rested his elbows on my knees and leaned forward, his forehead touching mine. ‘Transmitting images into your brain,’ he intoned. ‘Images of teachers in red leather thongs.’

‘Gross!’ I pushed him away, laughing. He fell back, resting on his elbows, the toe of his sneaker pressing against the toe of mine.

‘I almost wish you’d been there,’ I said a little later, when silence had replaced the laughter.

‘I wish I’d been there, too,’ he said, turning a jigsaw piece over and over in his hand, looking at the precise irregularity of its edges. ‘Because then I’d be thinking of how the bullets could have hit me, instead of sitting here imagining those bullets hitting you. All those bullets.’ His face took on one of those expressions again: the one with which he receded away from me.

‘You can’t think things like that. I wish you’d never think things like that.’

‘Tell me something funny, Raheen.’

I’d been saving this one up for him, for a moment when he’d really need it: ‘One of the names the British used to refer to Karachi, in the days when it was little more than a fishing village, was Krotchy.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Nuh uh. We could all be Krotchians. Or Krotchyites.’

‘Krotchyites! Sounds like a kinky communist party.’

I hadn’t yet finished rolling my eyes about that when Uncle Ali opened the door. ‘Let’s go, son. Way past your bedtime.’

In the hallway, my parents stood awkwardly with Aunty Maheen, no one speaking. Ami and Uncle Ali exchanged ‘what-just-happened-there?’ and ‘what-brought-that-on?’ looks. Aunty Maheen started walking quickly towards the door, and Aba speeded up too and touched her lightly on the shoulder. At first I thought she was going to ignore him, but then she turned round and shrugged, half-apologetically, half-not. ‘Forget about it,’ we all heard her say. She looked over Aba’s shoulder. ‘Come on, Karim, let’s go.’

Karim held my wrist for a moment, then followed his mother out.

‘Talk to her,’ Ami said to Uncle Ali.

‘Yasmin, I’ve forgotten how.’

Then he left, too.

Later that night, unable to sleep, I went towards my parents’ room, where I heard them through the part-opened door.

‘Why after all these years?’ Aba said.

‘Given what’s going on with her, why wouldn’t she think of how else her life might have worked out? Why wouldn’t she get angry that things didn’t happen differently?’

‘Do you think Ali knows? You know, about—’

‘I think that’s part of the reason he wants them all to move to London.’

Whatever it was they were talking about, I knew they’d stop if I walked into the room. And, ordinarily, I would have turned and walked away, nothing more discomforting than lurking in shadows listening to conversations that weren’t meant for you, but this had something to do with the possibility of Karim leaving Karachi, so I had to stay. I had to know.

‘Has she said anything to you?’ Aba said, after a hesitation that suggested he wasn’t sure he wanted to take the conversation any further.

‘No, of course not. She knows I’ll feel I’m betraying Ali if I do anything except censure the situation.’

‘You would?’

‘Wouldn’t you?’

Spell it out, I silently urged them on. S-P-E-L–L.

‘I think I would be compassionate about the situation without feeling I’m betraying Ali. And, let’s face it, if we portion out loyalties mine should belong with Ali and yours with Maheen.’

‘Quite the reverse, if we’re honest about it. Come on, Zafar: if Maheen told you she’d robbed an old woman you’d feel compassionate.’ Her voice became accusing. ‘You don’t feel you’re entitled to be anything but compassionate towards Maheen.’

I couldn’t help lifting up my arms in exasperation. Why make compassion seem like a crime?

‘Why so cold, Yasmin?’

‘Because many years ago we decided to square our shoulders and say, this is what we have done; we will live with it. We will make it something less than a waste and an unmitigated cruelty. And you’ve backed out of that, Zafar. You look over your shoulder and squirm as if to say, what is past is past, all I can do is look abashed and change the subject as fast as possible. When Raheen was born we both promised ourselves that wouldn’t happen.’

‘Raheen has nothing to do with this.’

‘Raheen has everything to do with this. Zafar, you were there when Ali told us Raheen’s been asking questions about the past. You were there, but you were the only one of the four of us who seemed to think it’s some passing curiosity that she’ll soon forget about. You want to know what brought on Maheen’s outburst? She knows that when Raheen asks questions, Karim asks them, too. She knows we’re all going to have to start marshalling facts, making our cases. She knows we’re all going to have to start thinking about it again.’

‘Not yet. Yasmin, not yet. We can’t tell Raheen yet.’ His voice was desperate, pleading.

‘Then when?’

‘When she’s old enough to know the impossibility of tracing backwards and saying, here, this is where love ends and this is where it begins. When she’s old enough to understand that sometimes there is no understanding possible.’

‘It’s possible. It’s always possible. It’s just occasionally easier not to interrogate it too closely.’

‘She doesn’t have to know yet, Yasmin.’

‘Zafar, sometimes I think I love you more than is good for either of us.’

‘You mean, you acquiesce.’ There was relief in his voice, and I exhaled deeply as if a hand had unclenched my own windpipe.

‘That’s only part of what I mean. But it’s the only part you’ll remember in the morning. Good-night.’

I made my way back to bed as noiselessly as possible. I had brought this on. Whatever it was that made Aunty Maheen use that terrible voice to Aba, whatever it was that made Uncle Ali and Ami exchange those looks of concern, almost fear, whatever it was that had my father near to tears in his need to protect me, I had brought it on.

I wouldn’t ask any more questions, I swore silently. Not even to myself. Not even if it killed me. No truth was worth such upheaval. My heart was still racing and I found my lips moving in prayer, giving thanks that whatever it was they were talking about, I didn’t know.

My bedroom door opened, and I heard Aba come in. He sat on the edge of my bed, and reached for my hand.

‘Are they going to move to London?’ I asked.

His grip tightened on mine. ‘It isn’t definite by any means,’ he replied, and I knew he said it because he couldn’t bear to tell me the truth.

. .

Aba drove through the puddles left by the evening’s monsoon shower, his headlights picking out steel billboards in a state of obeisance, bent over almost double by the weight of wind and rain, unable to return to an upright stance. Swish-swish of wheels traversing wet patches. Somewhere in front of us, almost out of hearing, a car with a burst silencer. Scent of a rinsed city.

‘Nice of Bunty to lend us the Pajero. Couldn’t manage six of us and luggage otherwise.’

‘Probably wouldn’t have made it this far in your car. That drain overflowing back there…’

‘Yes. That poor Suzuki…’

‘Remember the time your Foxy stalled and we had to wade home?’

‘Your brand-new Italian shoes ruined.’

Something reassuring about Aba and Uncle Ali’s voices from the front seat, engaged in meaningless talk as though there were no need to inject every statement with the weight of the occasion. Something reassuring also about Ami and Aunty Maheen silently holding hands, as though they were girls again; girls who no longer had pop stars and furtive smoking and shared crushes to bind them together, but who found that friendship was binding enough, even though there was little but friendship that now bound them to the school-yard twosome who broke every rule and got away with it.

But there was nothing reassuring about Karim. We were only inches apart, both swaying cross-legged on the suitcases in the back, but he was too busy looking at streets to pay attention to me. Looking at streets, and whispering street names when we drove past road signs, and drawing a map of the route we were taking from his house to the airport, his pen veering off course every time Aba braked or went over a speed bump or drove through a puddle.

At the airport, he handed me the map, our fingers barely touching. Then he swivelled round and threw his arms around my father and burst into tears. There was so much hugging goodbye between our parents, and between his parents and me, and my parents and him, that I pretended, even to myself, that it hadn’t really registered that the brush of fingers had been Karim’s and my goodbye.

On the drive home, I said, ‘Who’ll speak in anagrams with me now?’

‘Poor Karim is the one who’s left everyone. You’ll still have Sonia.’ My mother winked at me. ‘And Zia.’

Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised ‘Guaranteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’d still be those bottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?

After all, it was just the ends of my sentences I was losing.

That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine.

. .

The rain had stopped. Water drops shimmered in the gossamer interstices of a spider’s web outside my window. Not so much captured in the web as resting on it. I could, I thought, lift up that web, very carefully, and place it against my throat, where it would adhere, threads retreating into near invisibility and only rain drops remaining to glisten against my skin like some precious inheritance.

Jake’s hand reached across me to close the window. ‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking you for the last ten seconds to get rid of the draught.’

‘Didn’t hear you.’ I swivelled my legs off the window ledge, making room for him to sit next to me, but he remained standing on my bed, head inches away from touching the ceiling.

‘Of course you didn’t. It’s always Grand Central Station in here.’ He jerked his head at all the people, seven or eight of them, crowded into my tiny dorm room.

When the downpour had started, less than an hour earlier, I had been attempting to read a supermarket romance for my ‘Myths of Courtship’ class, but the sudden ferocity of the rain made me set aside my herbal tea and rush outdoors. It was the closest thing to the monsoons I had encountered in the three years I’d been at university in America, rain ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a Kalashnikov. I half-expected to see little frogs and winged insects appear. People were running for shelter, the ones who knew me shouting as they charged past that I was crazy, ‘Get inside, Raheen.’ I looked down. Crazy I could handle, but crazy in a white shirt was probably not such a good idea. I pulled the clinging material away from my body, hearing with satisfaction the suction release of wet cotton from flesh, and ran up the stairs towards central heating.

‘Study break. Ten minutes. My room. Who’s going to make the hot chocolate?’ I yelled down the hallway on my way into the shower.

Someone shouted, ‘But I’ve just started War and Peace,’ and someone else: ‘We’ve been back from the dining hall less than half an hour.’

‘Raheen says study break, ten minutes,’ another of my hallmates declared. ‘You want to argue with her?’

Less than fifteen minutes later, I had a crowd of people clustered in my room as, freshly showered and dressed in sweats and fleece jumper, I poured out hot chocolate with marshmallow bits from a large saucepan into mugs and plastic glasses bearing the university’s crest. Tamara from next door held up my romance novel with a whoop of delight, and the rest of my friends chanted, ‘Read, Raheen, read,’ over and over until, with mock resignation, I took the book from Tamara, sat on the window ledge by my bed, cleared my throat and started reading out loud choice passages in breathy, emotive style.

She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath.

His jeans were so tight they could barely contain him, and she trembled with fear and ecstasy at the thought that he might burst out of them at any moment.

She tossed her head, and wished she could do the same with her emotions.

‘Will you just come?’ He impatiently pushed the door open and gestured her through.

‘Make me,’ she replied, saucily.

He had always been a man to rise to a challenge.

When I finally stopped reading, even Jake, who had come into the crowded room halfway through and was slouching in the door frame, was shaking his head in amusement, though the evening before I’d walked out on him in the dining hall while he was in the middle of yet another rant about how little time the two of us spent together, alone. I had told him he just didn’t understand Pakistani attitudes towards friendship, and he’d sneered. That was, I had to admit to myself, entirely an appropriate reaction. I put the romance novel down. Between the body heat, central heating, cocoa and fleece I was beginning to feel a little hot. I turned to look outside, wondered exactly when it had stopped raining, and opened the window.

That smell in the air. The aftermath of rain. I let the book fall from my hands. Tawdry. Cheap and tawdry. I could hear Jake’s voice, but I didn’t want to have to deal with him, so I continued looking outside at the autumn leaves, vibrant reds and oranges, scattered across paths, plastered on to buildings. A breeze blew up and I came so close to telling everyone in the room to be quiet, just be quiet, so that I could hear the sound of leaves being blown about. Russet rustle. Almost the sound of waves breaking on pebbled sand.

In Karachi, I would never have been able to hold court for as long as I had just done. Hold court or play the jester, whatever it was that I had been doing. One or more of my friends would have sat down beside me, leaned an elbow on my shoulder, scanned ahead of where I was reading to some further point on the page and taken the book from my hands to read aloud the next absurd lines in exaggerated tones, at once competing and collaborating with me. I leaned my head against the window screen. Rain had tinged the mesh with the smell of rust. Not true, not true, that in Karachi I felt my world was perfect, although sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that when I was far from home. But even in Karachi I’d feel this need to turn away from people whose company, just seconds earlier, I had delighted in. Sonia sometimes told me off for my ‘mood swings’, in Sonia’s way of telling people off, which was not to rebuke or reprimand but merely to ask what was wrong. Once, not so long ago, I had finally said, ‘Even when I’m with everyone whom I could possibly want to be with, I feel like something’s absent,’ and Sonia, showing no signs of being hurt by this remark, nodded, and asked, ‘Absent or lost?’

There was a cobweb between the window and the ledge outside. Jake closed the window, and I turned back to my friends, wanting them gone, wanting him gone too.

‘Break over,’ I said.

Almost everyone stood up instantly, as though I had issued a military order, except for the guy who was supposed to be reading War and Peace. ‘But we haven’t even finished drinking our…’ he said.

Tamara nudged him. ‘Come on, finish it in my room.’ Behind Jake’s back she mouthed to me, ‘Should I take him with me?’ and I was about to nod, when Jake said, ‘Tamara, I can see your reflection in the mirror. Goodbye.’

After everyone had left, Jake stepped off the bed, and leaned against my desk, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. ‘You know, after you walked out on me at dinner last night—’

‘Oh, Jacob, for heaven’s sake, I didn’t walk out; I just said I had work to do and couldn’t stay to watch you sip your coffee.’

He scuffed the carpet with the toe of his sneakers. ‘Don’t call me Jacob.’

I rolled my eyes. ‘OK, after I walked out on you…what?’

‘I decided it’s over between us.’ He was looking down at his hands. They were somewhat too soft, Jake’s hands.

I nodded. ‘I understand.’

He raised his head and looked at me. ‘I was about to add, “but then I changed my mind”.’

‘Oh.’

We looked at each other for a few seconds, and then he said, ‘It really makes no difference to you either way, does it?’

A spider was picking its way to the centre of the web, sidestepping the drops of water. The sky cerulean once more. Cerulean is an anagram of acne rule. Imagine a pimply, pustular sky, Ra! I stood up so quickly I banged my head against the potted plant hanging from the ceiling near the foot of my bed. The pot tipped and loose soil showered down my jumper and on to my bed.

‘You OK?’ Jake moved forward, but I held my hands up to tell him to keep his distance. Tears in my eyes, and none of them because of him. I put my hand to my scalp and was almost disappointed to find no trickle of blood, nor even a bump. Jake stepped back and watched me scoop soil from the duvet into a cup and pour it back into the plant-holder.

‘Soiled sheets. Dirt on your fingers. Talk about a break-up scene heavy in symbolism.’ Jake made a sound that might have been laughter had it contained the slightest suggestion of amusement. ‘You know, I finally figured out last night what all of us have in common. Ricardo, Amit, myself. Couldn’t find any common denominator in all your boyfriends before. But it’s this: we’re the kind of guys you’ll always stop short of loving. And that makes life easy, doesn’t it?’

I didn’t want to think too hard about what he had said, so I looked around for tissue to wipe my fingers with. Jake offered the sleeve of his shirt, but I brushed the dirt off against a corner of my duvet instead. Don’t touch him, and this will be easier.

‘Actually, the common denominator, Jake, is that you all have really sexy wrists. Call me shallow.’

I sat on the window ledge again, pressed the nib of my fountain pen through the mesh of the screen, and unscrewed the bottom of the pen. Jake came to stand beside me as I gently squeezed the ink cartridge and a rain drop turned blue.

‘You really have this ability to find beauty in weird places.’

There was a tone of reconciliation in his voice, but when he had said it was over between us my heart had lurched ever so slightly, and if we were to stay together now perhaps it would lurch even more next week, next month or whenever that inevitable ending came. It would lurch especially if the ending didn’t come until early next summer when we would graduate and I would head home to Karachi. I looked beyond him to the mirror. There was a crack in the glass, right at eye level, and for a second I half-fancied I saw a splinter lodged in one of my absurdly large eyes, slashing its darkness.

‘I have work to do, Jake.’

‘So do I. Can I stay?’

I shook my head, without turning to look at him.

He was all the way to the door before he stopped and said, ‘Ever wonder how other people see you?’

I turned round. ‘Is this the cruel parting blow, Jake? You going to – what’s that funny expression? – hold up a mirror to my eyes?’

‘Your friends adore you, Raheen, because at the end of the day you’ll always forgive them no matter how hideously they’ve behaved. They adore you because they think you offer up your friendship and ask for nothing in return. But that’s not true—’ He took a deep breath. ‘You do ask for something. You ask that we never expect you to need us.’

He blew a kiss at me, and left.

I drew my legs up to my body and rested my chin on my knees. Jake was right. Until then I had always thought my college friends saw me as the entertainer. And as the one who couldn’t keep her opinions to herself. It was true, I supposed, that I didn’t bear grudges or hold people accountable for every slip-up, though that had more to do with my father than with me. Aba had always said that it was easy to condemn people; condemnation was an act of smugness, wasn’t it? Didn’t it arise from the certainty that you would never do what you were condemning someone else for? But how could you say that unless you could slip into their soul, peer around and see what serpents fed there, what abysses gaped? How could you say anything unless you knew how the serpents and abysses had come to be, and what it meant to live with them every single day? Shouldn’t we simply be grateful that our lives allow us to live with grace today? It came naturally to Aba – the ability to be grateful for his life, the ability to look at the Runtys of this world with understanding – but for me it sometimes felt as though I was forcing my nature into a mould I wanted to fit into rather than one that suited the contours of my personality.

I thought of everything Jake had just said, and looked at my watch. In Karachi, it was early in the morning, far too early to call my father without making him panic. But I needed to talk to someone – not just anyone, but someone who had always known me. I could call Zia, half an hour’s drive away in the same time zone, but I rarely spoke to Zia about Jake since that time Zia had landed up on Jake’s doorstep at midnight and announced that, although he had come to like Jake a great deal in the weeks since they’d first met, no white boy could lay hands on a Muslim girl and expect to live. Jake had leapt out of the second-floor window and broken his ankle. (‘How was I supposed to know you’d be seeing someone moronic enough to take me seriously?’ Zia had protested to me the next day. ‘There are white Muslims in the world, for God’s sake. Hasn’t he heard of Cat Stevens?’) No, I couldn’t call Zia and so much as mention Jake’s name without running the risk of him singing ‘Moonshadow’, which in Zia’s rendition became ‘Crescent Moonshadow’.

But Jake wasn’t really the issue here. I looked at my watch again and added ten to establish Karachi time once more. In a couple of hours Sonia would wake up to say her morning prayers. I could call her then, and ask, ‘Do you think I don’t need you?’ And however she answered, however tactfully, however generously, something in her response would remind me that we both knew I felt guilty about Sonia; if anyone asked who my closest friend in the world was I’d say her name without hesitation, but it was the lack of hesitation that comes from years of practice rather than conviction. In my heart, I still carried around the notion of a friendship that no reality could live up to.

I picked up my phone book. The last three years, every time I had been in Karachi packing to return to America, Ami would come into my room with a letter or package for Aunty Maheen, and every time she would say how much Maheen would appreciate it if I delivered it by hand next time I visited friends in Boston, or even if I just called from college to say ‘hello’, and every time I would say, ‘Yes, sure, you gave me the number. Meant to last semester, but things get so hectic,’ and every time Ami looked at me with something so close to disappointment in her eyes that I had to pretend something was lost and busy myself in a flurry of searching for it.

Ami didn’t know that in my first week as a foreigner, I had called that number, feeling excitement, even a touch of nervousness. It had been so long since I’d spoken to her. But it wasn’t Aunty Maheen who answered. It was a man, and as he repeated, ‘Hello?… Hello?’ down the phone, I heard Aunty Maheen’s voice in the background say, ‘Who is it, darling?’ and I thought of Uncle Ali in London, moving from one short-term affair to another, returning periodically to Karachi to tell my parents he didn’t know why he left, he couldn’t imagine returning, he was so afraid of old age. His life such sadness. I hung up, and cried all afternoon. I had never told anyone else about the call. Even now, I couldn’t quite understand it. All these years later, why did it continue to affect me so much more than I could bear?

I opened the phone book to ‘M’.

In my first days of college, I had gritted my teeth through freshman orientation with its attempts to create artificial bonds between everyone in the hall by getting us to share our most private pains, our most personal stories. I lied my way through it, of course, inventing broken hearts, ruined friendships, family disease, all in an attempt to keep up with the tragedies of the eighteen-year-old lives around me. But in my head I kept a chart of the real answers that came to mind to the questions: What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to deal with? What’s your happiest memory? What’syour biggest regret? Has there been one experience that changed your life? If you could pick up the phone and call one person now, who would it be? The questions went on and on, and every one of my answers had to do with Karim leaving and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen divorcing.