Текст книги "Kartography"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

Соавторы: Kamila Shamsie
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

Sonia yelled with delight, ‘I’m quickly, quickly rinsing.’

I sat down on her desk chair and picked up the magazine lying there, face down. It was the December issue of Newsline, the one that Karim had mentioned in our conversation two weeks earlier. I put it down and picked up the magazine next to it. The November issue of Newsline, with the words KARACHI: DEATH CITY running across the cover. I flipped it open and read an excerpted block:

Roaming the dark, death-haunted streets of Saddar where even the street lights were off, one would be confronted with the surreal glow of a flower shop not more than a thousand metres away from the troubled area of Jacob Lines. Asked why his shop was open late into the night when all others were closed, a flower-seller explained: ‘This is the season not of marriage but of death. People come to buy floral wreaths for those who die in the riots.’

Shivering, I turned to the last page, which was guaranteed to bring comic relief with its round-up of the most absurd lines from Karachi’s English-language press. Sure enough, there I read: ‘Only the other day he was spotted lolloping into a famous disco which was a wee bit abnormal hangout for a bud like him. When interrogated he bleached.’

I was still laughing when the bathroom door opened and Sonia enveloped me in an embrace that was all softness.

‘You hodious creature! When did you get back?’ She pulled back and smiled at me, and I couldn’t help thinking that if she were to walk down 5th Avenue just once, anorexic models would be pulled from the catwalk and a woman’s beauty would no longer be judged by her success in obliterating flesh.

‘Early this morning. You’ve put on weight since August. Looks good.’

‘Hanh, well, happiness has a high calorie count.’ She laughed and hugged me again. ‘OK, sit, I have news to tell you so big that your eyes will pop out of their sockets and plop on to the floor. But don’t worry: it was swept this morning.’

‘First call down and tell Dost Mohommad to let Zia come up.’

‘Zia’s here?’ She rolled down the sleeves of her kameez all the way to her wrists. ‘Did you fly back together?’ She bunched her wet hair together and squeezed out water, then reached behind me to the dupatta slung over the back of her chair and placed it on her head. ‘Let’s go down and sit with him.’

‘Have I entered a parallel universe here?’ I tugged at the dupatta, but she clapped one hand down to hold it in place. ‘What’s going on?’

She gave me one of her drop-the-topic looks. ‘We are Muslim women,’ she said.

I tried to find some sign that she was joking. ‘We were Muslim women four months ago, too.’

‘I thought we’d agreed to disagree about religion. Let’s go downstairs. Poor Zia must be getting bored.’

The intercom beeped three times to indicate there was a phone call for her. She picked up the phone, listened to the voice on the other end, and made a gesture in my direction that said, ‘Go down, I’ll join you there.’

Thoroughly confused, and more than a little concerned, I walked downstairs. Sonia’s and my friendship had always existed against all probability, our ways of life so tangential that logic should dictate we could only look at each other across a wide gulf, and wave. The reason our friendship had survived and strengthened over the years was that Sonia succeeded in being so self-effacing in her beliefs, allowing nothing in her convictions to act as reproach, and I was well aware that I scarcely extended her the same courtesy.

As I reached the bottom of the stairs I could see Zia through the open door of the TV room, shuffling through a pile of CDs but not paying any attention to the jackets, his eyes fixed on a framed picture of Sonia instead.

In America I’d tell people that Zia and I had been friends for ever, but the truth was vastly more complicated than that. When we were both fifteen he became my first boyfriend, a title he managed to retain for less than seventy-two hours. Quite what happened to bring everything to a disastrous end neither of us could now remember, but when it happened, with no Karim around to laugh at us and listen to us and, in so doing, smooth the transition from relationship back to friendship, I had taken to making the lives of our mutual friends unnecessarily difficult by declaring I wanted nothing to do with Zia. Of our entire group only Sonia seemed not to mind, and blithely ripped the ‘Z’ page out of her phone book as a show of her support for my position. When she did that I was, I’ll admit, dismayed; I wanted so much to have cause to dislike her, because it was clear that Zia had not, not for one moment, stopped being in love with her. Truth is, I missed his friendship, particularly since Karim was so far away and there was no one else with whom I could talk about Karim the way I talked about him with Zia. But I saw how much it hurt him to have Sonia put an arm around me and lead me away every time he approached, and so I continued pretending that I wanted to be lead away, my relationship with both Sonia and Zia a murky and tangled thing until Sonia finally let me yell at her, and the yells turned to tears which dissolved all my anger at her. By that time Zia had found his own group of friends; a ‘racy set’, as Aunty Runty put it to everyone at her beauty parlour, and for over a year he disappeared in a haze of drugs and alcohol, and then he disappeared between the covers of textbooks, having decided he was getting out of Karachi even if it meant learning every word on the SAT word-list by heart and taking tuition lessons for every subject, not with the popular tuition teachers who we all went to post-school en masse, but one-on-one teachers whom Zia’s father paid exorbitant amounts to aid Zia in racing to the top of the class, leaving his teachers no choice but to write letters of recommendation to US universities saying, for a while there he fell behind, but I have scarcely ever seen such a passion for learning as he has exhibited, blah, blah, blah.

America brought Zia and me together again – literally. At university, in the middle of New York state, nostalgic for things we’d never paid attention to, like Urdu music and basmati rice, Zia and I scoured the neighbouring towns and found each other at a moment when familiarity was ready to serve as a synonym for friendship. There was some initial tentativeness on both our parts when he first began to drive the half-hour from his college to mine on the feeblest of excuses, but it wasn’t long before we slipped into our old habit of camaraderie and were even able to laugh at the melodrama of our break-up, which had occurred in the biology lab while we were both dissecting rabbits. ‘I bet you’re imagining that rabbit is me,’ I had hissed to Zia, as he sped his way through the dissection at twice the speed everyone else was going. ‘Impossible,’ he had replied, stabbing a rabbit ventricle with his scalpel to send an arc of blood spurting at me. ‘The bunny’s got a heart!’

If sometimes in those first months of getting to know him again the whispers and suggestions of my college friends made me look at Zia and recollect first love, first kiss, and I found myself walking that line between remembering a past emotion and reawakening that feeling again, I had only to remind myself of the way Zia continued to look at photographs of Sonia to steel myself against further foolishness. Then Amit came along, then Ricardo, then Jake, and ‘How do you do it, Zee? How do you love the same person at twenty-one as you did at thirteen?’ I would ask, and Zia just shrugged and said, ‘Desiring the unattainable; that’s all this is about,’ knowing I knew him too well to believe it. Every woman he dated at college had at least a touch of Sonia about her and when he was the one to break off the relationship it was always because ‘she wasn’t who I thought she was’.

I cleared my throat as I walked into the TV room and Zia turned away from the photograph. ‘Just choosing some music to listen to.’ He picked up the CD from the top of the pile – some Eighties compilation – and looked at the titles listed on the back. ‘Remember when Sonia thought the lyrics to the Paul Young song were: “Every time you go away / You take a piece of meat with you”?’

‘Yes!’ Sonia walked into the room. ‘And Karim dreamt up this video in which a guy announces he’s running down to the supermarket, and his wife yells, “No! Don’t take the venison!”’

Zia moved towards her, then stopped. He’d reacted the same way on first seeing her during our first winter back from college, unsure if the resumption of my friendship with him meant that he and Sonia could take their relationship back in time to 1988 as well. Sonia had laughed at his hesitation and reached out to hug him. But this time it was the covered head, and the sleeves she was tugging over her wrists, that made him pause and look to her for the first move. We heard the door to the drawing room open, and her father’s voice came booming through; Sonia smiled at Zia and rested her fingers on the back of his hand. He blushed and, seeing that, she moved away from him, gesturing to us to sit down.

‘Is it your father?’ I asked. ‘Is he making you do the hijab bit?’

‘Raheen!’ Zia’s voice quavered. ‘She does have a mind of her own.’

‘Thanks, Zia. Raheen, stop asking bakwaasi questions. We have a lot to talk about that’s more interesting than my wardrobe. Most importantly,’ now it was her turn to blush, ‘the seventh of January.’

‘Birthday of Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the USA?’ I was thrilled to have the chance to display this piece of knowledge.

‘Well, OK,’ Sonia said. ‘But now you have even another reason to burn it into your memory.’

‘What, you getting married?’ I laughed.

‘Engaged.’

I did not dare look at Zia. I wanted to reach over and put my arms around him, but I knew the only thing I could do to demonstrate my friendship was to cover up his silence, which was so complete I wasn’t sure he was even breathing.

‘You’re getting engaged? Sneaky thing! You never told me there was anyone…’ I reached out to embrace her, but pulled back before we made contact. ‘Is it arranged?’

‘I really, really like him, Raheen. He’s twenty-six, his name’s Adel, good family, works with his father in the textile industry, really smart, good sense of humour, two sisters who adore him, we talk for ages on the phone every day, that was him just now calling from the office, and I’m happier than you’ve ever seen, admit it.’

‘Who could deny it? You’re radiant.’ Zia sounded like a child of seven, utterly lost, but trying to repeat a formula that his mother had taught him to get out of trouble.

Sonia looked sideways and down, and I wondered if she finally saw that I hadn’t been inventing things all those times in the last three years that I told her Zia would still walk on hot coals and eat them afterwards if she asked him to.

‘Is Adel the reason Zia is being treated like a potential rapist in your house?’

‘Raheen!’ Zia rose to his feet in an instant. ‘If she’s observing customs of proper behaviour…’

‘Proper behaviour? You can’t see her hair, can’t see her arms, can’t make more than minimal physical contact, can’t enter her bedroom. What does that say about you? As though you won’t be able to restrain yourself if…’ I faltered before the look on his face.

‘Oh, sit down, both of you. You’re such a drama queen, Raheen. And “customs of proper behaviour”…which rubbishwallah sold you that line, Zia? I know you don’t see the point in any of it. Now sit down and tell me if you want Dost Mohommad to bring tea or coffee.’

I sat down and put my arms around her. ‘When do I meet him?’

‘Not for a couple of weeks. In about an hour he’s leaving for London on work. And to buy me an engagement ring.’

‘Well, when I do meet him if he isn’t completely gaga about you I’ll have to punch him.’

‘Not his nose,’ Sonia said. ‘He has a lovely straight nose. Don’t ruin it.’

‘I’ll make sure to aim my punch well below the nose.’

‘Not too much below.’ She giggled. I started laughing too, and she turned red and pulled her dupatta down so it covered her face. ‘Tobah! You are such a bad influence. Zia, promise to keep an eye on her during the mangni; I’m fully nervous she’ll do something to embarrass me.’

‘When have I ever been able to keep her in check?’ Zia was smiling now, fooling Sonia into believing he was all right.

‘True. Only one person ever could. Good thing he’s also going to be here, flying in the day after tomorrow and staying until after the mangni. No way I’d let him miss my engagement.’

‘Seriously?’ Zia said, leaning forward but keeping his knees just a few millimetres apart from Sonia’s. ‘Karim’s coming?’

Sonia nodded and both of them looked at me, Sonia slightly nervous, as though unsure if she’d said something that would delight or appal me, and Zia merely appraising. He’d been the one who had, quite by chance, knocked on my dorm-room door just minutes after I finished that phone call with Karim, and he’d made it clear he thought I was being melodramatic, crying over something that had ended long before the phone had started to ring.

I leaned back against the cushions and watched the thin branches of the bougainvillaea whip against the window. If I closed my eyes I’d still see the red flowers, bright against my cornea, surrounded by black. If I closed my eyes I’d see Karim gather up pruned branches that his gardener had been about to throw into the incinerator; I’d see myself, aged thirteen, lying on the grass, resting my head on a pillow of bougainvillaea flowers, watching Karim fashion a hopscotch grid out of denuded branches. Through all that seeing, I’d hear myself laugh for no reason, no reason at all, and I’d wonder where that particular laugh had gone and I’d wonder if he’d bring it back with him when he walked through the doors of the airport.

. .

Whoever he was, he wasn’t my Karimazov, my Cream, my hopscotch partner, my shadow-self, my alter ego.

Showing his passport to the airport officials, just feet away from the wide-open terminal door, he was a tall, very tall, stranger with close-cropped hair, perfectly arched eyebrows, and stylish round glasses, dressed in jeans and sneakers. If it wasn’t for those absurd ears waggling out of the sides of his head, I might have mistaken him for a foreigner. ‘Just as I feared,’ I muttered to Zia, as we leaned against the barriers that stood between the terminal door and the crowds waiting to receive foreigners and foreign-returned. ‘He’s become a gora.’

‘What are you talking about? He’s darker than you are.’ Zia was trying hard not to act too excited about seeing Karim again, but the casual air with which he held a cigarette between his fingers was more than offset by the frequency with which he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, pausing only to try and raise his entire body weight with his elbows, which were planted on the barrier.

‘Not skin complexion, idiot. His mode of being. What’s he arguing with the customs guy about?’

‘They’re probably giving him a hard time about his Angrez passport. Or is it Amreekan? He could at least look up and wave. Damn, he’s tall. “Mode of being”?’

‘I still don’t know why he asked to stay with you, not me.’ I tilted my head to one side, as though a change in angle would make him look more familiar.

‘Propriety.’

‘Rubbish. If he came to stay he’d be my parents’ guest; staying with us because he’s Ali and Maheen’s son, not because he’s my one-time best friend.’ A man smelling as I imagined the inside of a local bus would smell tried to elbow me aside so that he could secure a spot right against the barrier, and I wondered how to push him away without actually making any physical contact with him.

‘Here he comes. Stop being moody.’

A swarm of cabbies surrounded Karim as he walked past the barrier without seeing us, and as Zia and I battled our way through the jostling figures we heard Karim say, in Urdu without a trace of hesitancy or rustiness, ‘I have friends coming to meet me,’ and the cabbies saying, ‘Where? Where are they? At this hour, they must be asleep. No one’s coming.’ And one enterprising fellow pulled out a phone card and gestured to the public telephone. ‘Call your friends. If there’s no answer, they’re asleep and you come with me.’ Karim turned the visiting card over in his hands. Strong hands, the kind that make you think instantly of massages. ‘Maybe if they don’t answer it means they’re on their way to the airport.’ But he didn’t sound convinced. Zia and I were standing within touching distance of him now, arms crossed, laughing, but he still didn’t look up and see us.

One of the cab drivers clapped the palm of his hand on the top of Karim’s head and turned it towards us. ‘There are your friends,’ he said.

Zia was closer to him, so it was Zia whom he threw his arms around, and I thought, he still hugs men like a real Pakistani, none of this let’s-pretend-there’s-nothing-intimate-about-our-physical-contact that so many American boys, and also so many Karachi boys who’d been watching too much America and too little Pakistan, were guilty of when they slapped and punched each other in greeting.

When he let go of Zia there was a moment when we just looked at each other, neither quite sure what to do, and I couldn’t say if that was because of the way our letter-writing ended or the way our phone conversation ended or the way some of the men around us seemed to be sizing us up, trying to determine the nature of our relationship, forcing us to wonder the same thing also. And in both our minds the soundtrack of our last phone call was playing. I half-smiled – there I went, thinking I could read his mind again. He laughed, that sudden self-conscious laugh of his, and put his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs resting on bare skin, either side of my neck.

‘Idiot,’ I said, and put my arms around his waist, everything forgotten except how easily we always forgave each other. He disengaged almost immediately, and turned to catch Zia by the elbow.

‘Zee, is that a shaving cut on your chin?’

Zia punched him lightly in the ribs, and Karim grabbed Zia in a headlock and spun him around, both of them laughing. For a moment they weren’t men just past the brink of adulthood any more, but the same two boys who had stood in front of a mirror and made their first attempts at shaving some seven or eight years ago, both of them arriving in school the next day with nicks and cuts all over their faces, even in places where bristles hadn’t started to grow. We would all have laughed at them a lot more if they hadn’t combined their talents and presented such a perfect balance of swagger and self-deprecation.

Karim finally let go of Zia, and looked around him in some surprise. ‘I can’t believe this airport! It’s so spacious and so clean.’

‘So all foreign visitors can have a good first impression of the city. It’s all downhill from here.’ Zia waved the porters away and said he’d bring the car round. Seconds later, it was Karim and me and a suitcase standing by the side of the road, waiting, the cab drivers and porters and onlookers no longer interested in our presence. Cars shimmered in the sunlight like a mirage. Karim’s glasses shimmered, too; perhaps he was the mirage. If I were ever delusional or hallucinating it would make sense for me to conjure up Karim, and not just any Karim but a Karim who looked like this. I looked sideways at him, but didn’t say anything; I wanted to see if we could still be comfortable in silence. He didn’t say anything either; he was too busy looking around, learning the landscape, the squat shrubs and billboards and low-rise buildings just past the manicured airport grounds, and recalling that, yes, this is what Karachi feels like at five-thirty on a winter’s morning; time to wake up to cram in that last round of studying for today’s exam, which we should have finished preparing for last night. These last three years, Karachi nothing more than holiday for me, I’d slept through this early daylight time, awakening only when the sun had been out long enough to glaze over the chill in the air, so now even I couldn’t help a prickle of nostalgia for those school mornings of sweaters and chapped lips and staticky hair. Karim shivered, and I wrapped one end of my shawl around him, without actually making any contact with his skin – that was not through accident and certainly not through disdain. Coyness – or was it self-consciousness? – entered my life as we stood there, and confounded me entirely.

‘It’s not cold,’ he said.

‘You’ve got goosebumps.’

‘It’s not cold.’

Zia pulled up and I told Karim to sit in the front seat. I sat behind the driver’s seat and watched him watch Karachi as Zia drove us out of the airport ground and on to the road, which was free of congestion at this hour, giving us an unobstructed view of the billboards: MOD GIRL! CUTE! – an advertisement for talcum powder; HAIR STOP FACE – an ad for facial-hair remover; WESTMINSTER ABBEY – an upstart rival to the well-established BIG BEN underwear company, attempting to attract customers with its painting of a man in leopard-print Y-fronts swinging his hips and raising his arms in triumph.

Karim pointed at the hip-swinging man. ‘Zia, he looks like you! So that’s what’s become of the heirloom leopard skin that used to hang in your TV room. Are there matching socks?’

‘Oh, go to hell,’ Zia said, but he was smiling along with me to see Karim being so Karim.

We were in view of the Star Gate, which heralded the turn-off to the old airport, the one from which Karim had departed with his parents more than seven years ago, the nuclear family still intact back then, though showing signs of exploding.

‘All right, where are we headed?’ Zia asked. ‘Karim?’

‘Come to my place for breakfast,’ I suggested. ‘My parents can’t wait to see you.’

‘How about visiting the bride-to-be?’ Karim said quickly, so quickly he must not have heard me.

‘She’s in Dubai for the weekend, visiting some relatives. And besides, if she were here it wouldn’t look right if we had her woken up,’ Zia said.

‘Arré.’ Karim laughed. ‘What rot are you on about?’

‘Implies familiarity,’ Zia muttered. ‘Too much of it.’

I repeated the invitation to have breakfast with my parents. Karim looked out of the window. Was he too overwhelmed by the remembered sights and sounds to be able to concentrate on anything anyone was saying? What had he meant by that remark about my father when we’d spoken on the phone? Which of us was going to be the first to bring up all the things we’d said?

‘Ask me directions from here to somewhere I used to know, Zia.’

‘OK. Kindergarten.’

‘That’s easy. Straight down Shahrah-e-Faisal and right on to Abdullah Haroon Road, and the school’s on your right just before Aiwan-e-Saddar Road.’

I couldn’t refrain from adding, ‘Or, in Karachispeak, go straight straight straight straight straight and then turn right just after the Metropole, and when you see a church, stop.’

‘Straight straight straight straight straight, huh?’ Hard to tell if Karim was amused or annoyed, his expression cut off from me as he stuck his head out of the window, taking in the street’s mishmash of tall concrete office buildings, large houses, and the signs, at the entrance to plots of land enclosed by boundary walls, spelling out ‘Hina Marriage Garden’, ‘Diamond Marriage Garden’, ‘Sindbad Marriage Garden’. Zia caught my eye in the rear-view mirror and gave me an exasperated look. I shrugged.

Karim retracted his head. ‘So many new buildings, and the driving is crazier than I remember, even with early-morning traffic. Wait, isn’t that the turn-off for Tariq Road and Mohommad Ali Society? Can we go to Kaybee’s?’

‘You want ice cream at this hour?’

He pulled his ear and looked at me thoughtfully. ‘No, I suppose not. This is all so strange for me…’ He stuck his head out of the window again.

A bus sped past, just inches away, and Zia reached over and pulled Karim back into the car. ‘Look out of the windscreen, OK? You’re no fun when you’re decapitated. So talk to us, yaar, tell us things. What have you been doing since you graduated last year? And why do you have a girlfriend named Spa?’

I tried not to look too interested. Sonia had mentioned the girlfriend after she’d met Karim in London the previous year, though she had no details on how serious things were between them.

‘Don’t really know what I’m doing with life outside uni. So, I’ve put aside the year to travel before worrying about it. And her name’s actually Grace, which is what I call her, but she got her nickname because her parents fell in love while watching “Spartacus”.’

‘That’s about as romantic as it gets.’ I laughed. He couldn’t possibly be serious about someone who allowed herself to be called Spa.

‘And besides, she’s my ex-girlfriend.’

Ha!

Zia blew his horn at a legless beggar crossing the street in a wheeled contraption, just inches off the ground, and swerved away from him. Karim didn’t react, though I had expected him to have a moment of tourist horror.

‘Was it the 1960 version, or the 1967 reissue?’ I asked. ‘Because, you know, the 1967 version cut out that great moment of whatshername looking at Spartacus writhing on a cross and saying, “Oh, please die, my darling.” If that’s not dialogue to fall in love to, what is? I bet it was the 1960 version.’

‘Still the Queen of Trivia,’ Karim said. ‘Hey, QT.’

‘Hey, Bloody Damn Idiot. Can you spot that clever acronym, BD-I? But before we lose track of the conv, tell me, did you and Grace ever watch “Spartacus” together?’

‘Oh, you didn’t,’ Zia said. ‘That would be too weird. Who wants to re-create their parents’ relationship, have to imagine when they were young and hormonal and…’ He looked at Karim, went bright red and started cursing the beggar who was now barely visible in the rear-view mirror. Karim turned to look at me, his expression unfathomable, then looked hurriedly away.

I remembered something I’d been wondering about for a while. ‘So, have you ever visited your mother in Boston in the last few years? While Zia and I were on the east coast? Were you there, too?’

‘Don’t start with the recriminations,’ he said shortly and looked away.

How could I explain to him about Aunty Maheen, when I hadn’t really explained it to myself? He probably suspected that I had flown out of Boston again on my way home and still hadn’t called her, despite his rebuke to me on the phone. It’s not as though I hadn’t thought of it. It’s not as though I hadn’t picked up the telephone and started to dial the number, more than once, more than twice, more than that even. I wanted to lean across and shake Karim. Why did this have to be so difficult? Although Zia barely ever answered his letters, and hadn’t had any kind of verbal communication with him since we all left school, aside from one phone call last week when Karim asked if he could stay at Zia’s, they were chatting away in the front seat as though no time had passed and nothing had changed since 1987, pausing only to look at each other, still sizing up the changes time had wrought in their physical selves, then laughing, half-embarrassed, as boys do when they’ve been caught paying any kind of attention to the way other boys look. And when Sonia had met Karim in London she had come back and reported that he was the same, their friendship was the same, everything same-to-same, except that now he was gorgeous, but that’s just superfacial change, right?

‘I can’t believe I’m back,’ Karim said.

‘The temptation is strong to say, there is no going back.’

‘Resist it,’ he advised.

Resistance was never my strong suit, so I tried to look only at his ears. They really were his least attractive feature, and I had to concentrate hard to avoid shifting my attention to the triangle of moles on the nape of his neck, and the FromHereToEternity length of his legs, and the supple fingers that were drumming snatches of REM’s ‘Nightswimming’ on thigh, throat, clavicle, and all this I was manag ing quite well, but what was really getting to me were the veins that stood out on his wrist and forearms, even when his hands were relaxed, and one vein in particular that ran all the way from his wrist to his elbow.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked, as Zia turned off the airport road earlier than he would if going to my house or his.

‘I’ve made a command decision. We’re off to Mehmoodabad. I have to look at a billboard that has my face painted on it.’

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘I agreed to pose for this photograph for some ad. As a favour to Cyrus’s cousin – you remember Cyrus from school, Karim? – who’s just started up this ad agency. Anyway, I thought it would be some print ad, but it turns out my long lashes are going to greet you as you ascend Clifton Bridge. According to Cyrus’ cousin the painters have captured my features but missed my essence, so I have to drop in on the painters and radiate essence so that they know where they went wrong. They start work at dawn, poor bastards, so they should be there now.’

‘What are you advertising,’ I asked.

‘I didn’t actually bother to ask.’

‘Mehmoodabad,’ Karim said. ‘That’ll be great.’

‘Why?’ I was instantly irritated. It wasn’t my Karimazov but the foreign cartographer speaking – the one who had sent me maps of Karachi from London, informing me how limited my knowledge of the place was. ‘Why will Mehmoodabad be great when you’ve probably never been there?’

Zia turned up the volume of the music, and Nusrat’s rendition of ‘Mera Piya Ghar Aya’ drowned out anything Karim might have thought to say in retaliation. Mera Piya Ghar Aya… My beloved came home.

We crossed Kala Pul, the Black Bridge that wasn’t black, and turned into the residential streets of Defence Housing Authority (Phase II), just past the roundabout that displayed a model of a fighter-plane with a trail of fire shooting out of its rear (when Runty and Bunty provided a map to their house for one of their Ghutna parties, the roundabout was marked: ‘jet with flaming ass’). I closed my eyes, overcome with sleepiness. When I looked out again the comparative order of Defence had given way to the narrow alleys and tiny store-fronts of Mehmoodabad. I had no idea how we’d got here, and Zia seemed a little surprised himself. I could hear him muttering, ‘Left after the place where the goats were eating the antenna, then right…before or after the hubcap?’