Текст книги "Salt and Saffron"

Автор книги: Kamila Shamsie

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

Chapter Seventeen

I left Dadi’s house before my grandmother emerged from her room. Meher Dadi seemed to understand. ‘You can’t leap from that story into idle chit-chat,’ she said. ‘Go home. Sit out in the garden where the crickets chirp, and listen to the weeping of ghosts. They deserve a little attention now and then.’

I did just that. It was my favourite time of day; trees and houses and electricity poles silhouetted against the sky which was not so much dark as absent of light. The afterglow of sunset, an in-between time. I lay on the grass, kicked off my shoes and held my hands up, fingers apart, to allow the breeze to caress as much of my body as possible. The rustle of leaves was a benediction. Karachi’s nights remind you that you can love a place, and for me that’s always been a reason to rejoice. But that night I thought of Akbar flying into Karachi for the first time. How alien it must have been to him. How lost he must have been in that first moment when he disembarked and thought, My children will call this home. They will know sunsets over the ocean and the taste of crab so fresh it’s barely dead and they will hear blessings in the breeze from the sea. But they will not know Sulaiman and they will not know Taimur. And in not knowing those two, they will not know me.

He was twenty-six.

History betrayed Akbar and Sulaiman. At any other time the elders of the family would have chastised them for their foolishness, told them they weren’t boys any more, forced them to shake hands. But it was 1946 and all sorts of foolishness was in the air.

When the brothers walked back to the dining room, several feet apart, the assembled company took one look at Meher’s tears and Sulaiman’s jaw and a cacophony of questions arose.

Sulaiman spoke first. ‘My brother has just convinced me that Pakistan is a good idea. We can send the dregs of Dard-e-Dil there, and he’ll be the first.’

The atmosphere in that room was already tense, the good cheer brought on by dinner unable to sustain itself through dessert. If Akbar and Sulaiman hadn’t been so intent on their own rage earlier they would have heard the raised voices, and from the sudden hush that followed they would have known that the Nawab, with all the courtesy and regality at his disposal, had requested that there be no more talk of politics. But the peace that prevailed was uneasy, and it took only one sentence from Sulaiman to destroy it. Before the evening was over the terms ‘polite disagreement’ and ‘neutral party’ had disappeared from the Dard-e-Dil lexicon. Akbar aside, all the other Dard-e-Dils present at the palace that evening would continue to coexist within a radius of a few square miles until the following year, when Pakistan came to life, but it was a strange, strained year with few moments of family solidarity.

(The Nawab? Everyone gathered at the dinner called him Binky. How effective could he have been in bringing them to order?)

Perhaps it was inevitable, the falling out. In a family like the Dard-e-Dils – so proud and so stubborn – it’s hard to imagine people shrugging their shoulders and calling the choice between India and Pakistan just a matter of different opinions. And yet, instead of blaming the family characteristics, we blame Akbar and Sulaiman.

When Samia told me not to mention my grandparents to Baji, it was because the general consensus – on both sides of the border, though I wasn’t aware of that until Samia explained it to me – was that ties between the Indian and Pakistani sides of the family would eventually have been renewed if it hadn’t been for Akbar and Sulaiman, each declaring that he did not want to hear his brother’s name again, each constantly reminding the rest of the family of all the harsh words, the insults, the curses that had been hurled across the Nawab’s table. The only one who could have brought the brothers together was Dadi, or so it is claimed, but she never tried. Worse, when Akbar once – while picking candles out of a birthday cake and looking sadly at the pock-marked frosting – wondered what his brother was doing, Dadi accused him of being spineless.

How to reconcile this story with my own memory of Dadi crying, ‘We were girls together.’ I think I know the answer. They weren’t happy together, my grandparents. Ami once told me the reason Aba so seldom raises his voice to anyone is that he grew up in a house filled with shouting. So, if Dadi railed against Akbar for mentioning Sulaiman, maybe it was just because she was looking for an excuse to rail against Akbar.

But is it possible that in twenty-five years there was never a moment when they were simultaneously nostalgic for everything they’d left behind, for every voice they could no longer hear? The truth may be that it was easier to make one swift break and swear never to look back. The truth may be that Dadi loved Akbar too much to allow him to begin to think of everything he’d lost.

But what of everything she had lost?

I stood up and walked over to Mariam Apa’s hibiscus. After Mariam left, the mali asked Ami what should be done about the hibiscus. Ami told him to look after it as Mariam had, and never, never to snip off the branch which curved in front of the dining-room window. I sometimes think Ami was the one who missed Mariam most of all. She wasn’t haunted by her absence, or angered by her departure, or disturbed by all she had failed to see. She just missed her. If Mariam were to come back, Ami would be the only one who’d say, ‘I’m glad you’re here,’ and consider the conversation ended. But suppose Mariam were to come back with Masood? That could never happen, so I don’t even speculate.

Speculate, I demanded of myself. Go on, speculate.

But I couldn’t.

I ran my fingers along the hibiscus plant, scoring the bark with my fingernails. When Mariam was around it hadn’t mattered, but now I felt so terribly the need to have her explained. I had thought Taimur could lead me to her, if I only asked the right questions about him, but he grew more and more elusive. To leave your home and never go back – to commit yourself completely to making another place home – that I could understand. Dadi and Akbar’s story doesn’t baffle me, though it sometimes saddens me. But to leave home, alone, and then to return just once, for one night, that I cannot comprehend. Somehow he must have followed the lives of his family. How else would he have known his mother was sick? How else would Mariam have known that, other than Dadi, who was in Paris at the time, the closest relative she had to turn to was Aba? Her closest relative in Pakistan, that is. Why Pakistan and not India? Was she in Pakistan already? Had Taimur ended up in Pakistan, as Sulaiman claimed Akbar believed he would? Or was Pakistan simply closer than India to wherever Taimur and Mariam lived? Did that mean she came from Iran? Afghanistan?

Turkey?

When Samia first went to college in London she fell in with a strange arty set who spent their Friday nights watching foreign films and ordering out for meals which, in their ethnic origins, complemented the movies. The group fell apart over an argument about whether hamburgers were suitable accompaniments to a German film, but by then Samia had developed a taste for subtitles. She came back to Karachi over her Easter holiday and demanded that Sameer and I scour the video stores for foreign films. She wasn’t amused when we returned with a pile of Hollywood flicks.

So Sameer and I set off again and returned with a Turkish film, which the man at the video store told us we could keep since he had so little use for it that he really couldn’t understand what it was doing in his shop to begin with. I don’t remember what the movie was about beyond the fact that it involved chickens, a three-legged dog and a man named Murat. We would never have sat through the whole thing if Sameer and I hadn’t been too frightened of Samia’s wrath to suggest turning it off, and if Samia hadn’t been too proud to admit she’d rather watch low-brow Hollywood fare. But halfway through the movie Mariam Apa entered the TV room and laughed at the subtitle, ‘You want to rent a room?’ Then she laughed at, ‘Is that the sun?’ and almost fell off her chair at, ‘You look very pretty.’

Three months later Samia sent Sameer a postcard:

Guess what Sam 2! Remember the Turkish movie? Well, I mentioned it to my Turkish friend, Omër, and he says it’s a great comedy. Very subtle humour! He knows chunks of it by heart – translated some dialogue for me and it really was funny, though it didn’t ring any bells at all as far as my memory of the subtitles was concerned. Guess we got a lousy translation. Must go – there are strawberries.

Love, Sam 1.

P.S. How come Mariam understood the humour?

In the days that followed the arrival of the postcard I tried casually mentioning Ataturk and Istanbul and Turkish delight around Mariam Apa, but she didn’t show even a flicker of interest. Still, I never quite forgot about it.

Why would Taimur have gone to Turkey?

Back again to Taimur, that inexplicable man.

It’s true that there were relatives aplenty in the family who had been part of the Khilafat Movement just before the triplets were born, and throughout Taimur’s childhood those relatives spoke often of that political movement which tried to show the British that Muslims around the world would not accept the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. One of the uncles even stayed in Turkey for a few months, just before Ataturk declared Turkey a secular state, and after he returned he made a point of teaching all the children of the family the rudiments of the Turkish language. So it’s not inconceivable that Turkey should have had a certain hold on Taimur’s imagination. It certainly had a hold on the imaginations of most Indian Muslims of his parents’ generation, and Taimur always loved to listen to his elders’ stories. But even so … What was Taimur’s story?

Mosquitoes had begun to buzz around me so I pulled my dupatta close like a shawl, using it to shield my bare arms from the onslaught. As a child I would tell myself things like, If I stay outdoors and brave the insects for a whole hour then tomorrow the boating plan will work out. If, subsequently, the boating plan didn’t work out, it would be because I stayed outside only fifty-nine minutes, or because I cheated by lathering on calamine lotion afterwards, or because mosquitoes died in my dreams that night.

Was that childhood logic so different from my way of thinking now? If I ask the right questions the answers will come. If the answers don’t come it’s because I haven’t asked the right questions, haven’t pried out the necessary details from those who feel no pleasure in remembering, haven’t recalled that one lift of an eyebrow which changes everything. But what about the silences that can’t be retold in stories? What about the forgotten commas which shape us as much as the exclamation marks? Masood once said to me, ‘Why is it that when people exchange recipes they so often forget to mention salt?’

I had laughed then and Masood, uncharacteristically offended that I shouldn’t take him seriously, served unsalted food to the family that night.

‘What is this?’ Aba had said, staring down in horror at his plate, after just one morsel. ‘What is this?’

How the absence of a single ingredient can alter the meal before you. How the absence of a detail can alter a story. How much salt had been left out in all the stories I’d ever heard from, and about, my family? How much salt did I leave out when I turned my memories of Mariam and Masood into a story? Well, I knew part of the answer to that. I left out my own reactions. Of late I’d been telling myself that eventually, when everything was resolved in my mind, I’d put myself in the story and say that at first I’d reacted terribly. Then I went far away and allowed myself time to think about it and my mind accepted the marriage. Then, one day, so did my heart. And so I went to visit Khaleel in Liaquatabad.

If only it were that simple.

I imagined Khaleel before me, laughing. ‘Salt? How déclassé. I’d have thought you’d season your metaphors with nothing less than saffron.’

Masood loved saffron, but when he spoke about food in terms of devotion he referred back to that déclassé seasoning. ‘I believe in God because all of science can never explain the miracle of salt,’ he said and I, having learnt my lesson, nodded.

What if all of storytelling couldn’t explain Taimur?

I stood up so quickly I had to sit down again. Could it be that simple? Mariam Apa never spoke because speaking would mean trying to explain Taimur, and that she was unable to do. So she hid in menus – hid in that wondrous yet confined world of lunch and dinner and, sometimes, tea – marking out the boundaries of what she could and could not speak of. She knew, as do we all, that it is useless to say you will keep quiet on one subject, because everything is interconnected. Start talking about cricket and within five minutes you might be on the subject of yaks’ milk without a single non sequitur. Ask a person one question and you set yourself up to be asked a question in return. So Mariam asked no questions, revealed no clues, started no conversations which could sprawl beyond her control. Rather than keep quiet on one subject, she kept quiet on every subject but one. It’s the only way of keeping a secret.

Or … I squeezed my head between my hands, not knowing if I wanted my thoughts to slow down or speed up. Something was shaping inside my skull … Had all of us always been wrong about her silence? We assumed the silence was about not speaking, but what if it was about not not-listening? Did she move mute among us in order to observe? Was she so intent on listening because there was something she needed to hear? Perhaps, just as we were waiting for her to give us the answers about Taimur, she was waiting for us to help her understand why her father walked away from the family she missed so much when she was growing up. In the end, was the failure ours for being unable to hear the questions she shouted out through silence?

Or did we finally answer those questions and, in answering them, make it impossible for her to do anything except follow Taimur’s example and leave?

Chapter Eighteen

Two rare and remarkable things: messages from both Samia and Celeste in my in-box when I logged on to my e-mail. I knew that Samia would have something to say about tea at Baji’s with Khaleel so I clicked on Celeste’s message first.

Hey, Babe.

How’s my favourite decadent Pakistani doing? Thought of you yesterday (like that’s a rare event!) while watching an old Audrey Hepburn movie with my brother – the former metal-head has become an aficionado of fifties movies. Go figure. The movie? You guessed it – Sabrina! I’ve always enjoyed it, despite its refusal to acknowledge the rigid, though unspoken, class structure in the US, but yesterday I couldn’t concentrate on it. Kept thinking of you and Mariam and … I want to write ‘Missouri’ but I know that’s not his name. Mussood?

So, anyway, I’m still waiting to get an epiphany e-mail from you. You know what I mean. Our likeable but flawed heroine walks out from her élite neighbourhood, and, spurred on by an e-mail from her American friend (remember, in these stories someone Euro-American has to be responsible for showing our élitist Third Worlder the light), she notices the poverty in other parts of the city for the first time – No! She feels empathy for the first time – and she turns her back on her life of privilege and dedicates her days to helping the needy. Roll credits.

Seriously, though, I know things can’t be easy. What little news we get from your part of the world is pretty frightening. Tell me it’s just the US media up to their old tricks. I miss you, girl. When do you return stateside?

Love,

Your favourite I-claim-to-oppose-decadence-but-live-in-a-system-steeped-in-it American.

I dashed off a reply:

C–In the kind of movie you’re talking about our heroine wouldn’t be inspired by a Euro-American; she would be a Euro-American. Possibly shown the light by some mystical but ineffectual Eastern type.

More later.

Love,

A.

Sameer came through the door, holding two glasses of Coke in his hands and two packets of chilli chips between his teeth. ‘Hey!’ he said, and the chilli chips fell on to the desk beside me. ‘No saliva on them, I swear. Miracle of miracles … Is that actually a message from my sister?’

I didn’t want anyone, not even Sameer, to see me reading a message about Khaleel, so I clicked from the in-box back to Celeste’s message, and turned to the chilli chips. I crushed the packet between my palms and shook it vigorously to ensure an even distribution of masala. I once asked Masood if he could make chilli chips that tasted like the ones in the packet. He bit into the chilli-red potato stick I proffered him, and looked pained. ‘Would you have asked Ghalib to write a letter to the telephone company for you?’

I pushed my laptop away. ‘I’ve just developed a theory, Reemas.’

‘Well, spill all, Brer Fox.’

‘No, moron. It’s your name backwards. Reemas.’

‘Oh, Reemas. Not Remus of Uncle fame. Nor Remus, even, of Romulus fame. Moron yourself.’ He kicked my chair, and I tried to imagine coming back to live in Karachi if Sameer wasn’t here. It’s all very well to love a place, but in the end what matters most is the people who live there. Why did Taimur leave Dard-e-Dil?

‘Your theory, professor?’

‘Snobbery is based on fear.’

‘Already it sounds highly unoriginal.’ He tipped a handful of chips into his mouth and followed it with a sip of Coke to accentuate the taste of the masala.

‘No, no, not fear of a revolution or anything like that. Fear of squalor. Fear of being entirely powerless, entirely overlooked. It’s not that we can’t empathize with those on the lower rungs of society; the problem is that we can. We can imagine what it feels like to be so deprived, and it’s our fear that we could, or our children could, end up like that which makes us keep our distance from the have-nots. Because at a distance we don’t have to think about it.’

‘Tell me you just came up with that and haven’t had time to think it through.’

‘Why?’

‘First, are you saying there’s no distinction between class and wealth? Haven’t you heard your Dadi, or even your parents, or my parents, talk about the nouveau riche? Are we lower down the class ladder than the Mushtaq family next door, who pull out their teeth just so they can have them replaced by solid gold?’

‘We don’t know that they pull out their teeth.’

‘Yeah, right. Their family suffers from a rare disease called tooth dropsy.’

‘Forget about the teeth. Let’s get back to my theory. I think our family’s attitude towards the nouveau riche is another symptom of fear. We’re uncomfortable around them because they remind us that class is fluid; the Mushtaq parents may be considered nouveau riche, but their kids are being sent to finishing school to acquire polish and within a generation they’ll marry into respectable but no-longer-rich families, and they’ll start turning up their own noses at the nouveau riche. This reminds us that status is not permanent; as the Mushtaqs rise, someone else will fall, and that someone might be us.’

Sameer pulled my laptop towards him and read Celeste’s message. ‘I see.’

‘What?’

‘You’re feeling guilty about not devoting your life to helping the needy, and it salves your conscience to say your snobbery is related to your great empathy. Oh, baychari Aliya. Too sensitive to hang out with the poor! That’s a Starched statement if ever!’

He was right, but so was I. ‘What would you do if you saw Masood tomorrow?’ How odd that I’d never thought to ask him this before.

Sameer shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Say hello, I suppose. Tell him my palate misses him. If you’re asking if I’d invite him home for tea, no I wouldn’t. And if I did, he’d refuse.’

‘But suppose … Remember he used to say he wished he could read English? What if Mariam Apa taught him? What if he’s read, I don’t know …’

‘Frantz Fanon?’ Sameer made a dismissive gesture. ‘Are you saying it’s all about education? The great leveller. You think if you read John Ashbery all differences cease to matter. Come on, Aliya. You’re smarter than that.’

I felt my face flush at the mention of Ashbery. ‘That’s not fair, Sameer.’

‘To hell with fair. You spend half an hour with this Khaleel – sorry, Call – he alludes to your favourite poets, and now you can’t handle the fact that your biases are conflicting with your hormones, so you try to convince yourself that you’re not a snob, you’re just empathetic. You don’t discriminate; you just have more in common with people who are educated. And you’ll rewrite everything in the past which conflicts with this theory, including the way you feel about Mariam and Masood.’

I thought of Khaleel drinking tea out of a saucer. How desperately I still wanted to believe that he only did it to test me. All the poetry in the world couldn’t change that. ‘Okay, go away.’

‘Aliya, Aloo, cuz. Listen to me. It doesn’t work. I tried it. With a girl from work. She wasn’t lower down on the social ladder or anything, she was just from a really different type of family. Like to like makes the most sense. Look, if it makes you feel better, tell yourself you’re pulling away because of difference, not because of snobbery. Tell the truth: can you see yourself getting married to this guy? Can you see yourself coming to Karachi for the holidays and staying with his family in Liaquatabad? Don’t tell me the thought doesn’t appal you.’

The thought appalled me. ‘Who’s talking about getting married?’

‘You’ve got to think long-term. If it’s obvious from the start that it won’t work out, cut your losses. Why start something that can never progress?’

‘Mariam did.’

‘Do you think she’s happy?’

‘Do you think he is? Why don’t we ever ask that?’

‘You know why we never ask that.’

Why did he go back to his birthplace? After his father died. Why did he go back? Was he sick of the pretence? Was it his version of an ultimatum? I’d never thought of their relationship as something with squabbles, and jealousies and demands. It was as though I could only begin to understand the relationship – why couldn’t I just say ‘affair’? – by making it some mythical, two-dimensional thing, larger and also so much smaller than life.

How did he hear of his father’s death? How did he tell Mariam of it? When did he decide to leave?

My parents had a dinner party at our house the night before Masood left. Masood burnt the naans and had to cycle out for more, delaying dinner by a few minutes. It’s a strange detail to remember, but I remember it particularly because I had only just learnt to drive and I offered to drive him round the corner to the naanwallah, but Masood said no.

‘Don’t you trust my driving, Masood?’ I laughed.

‘It won’t look right. You chauffeuring me around.’

‘What rubbish. I’ll get the keys. Don’t leave.’

But he did. Mariam Apa was standing in the driveway when I walked out, keyring in hand, and yelled for Masood. She shook her head at me and spun her index fingers to mime bicycle wheels.

‘Why is he being so silly, Apa? I drove the mali to the bus stop last week.’ Then I thought of adding, Besides, Masood’s virtually family, but stopped myself. No, I knew that wasn’t quite true, but why did he have to go and act as though he and I were servant and mistress, rather than …

Rather than what? Mariam Apa’s raised eyebrows asked me.

Rather than two people who often ate dinner together when my parents and Mariam Apa were out for the evening, particularly on cool evenings, when it was a pleasure to be outside the kitchen door, cross-legged under the stars.

Mariam Apa enacted dialling a phone number.

Yes, it had been a while since the news that my family was going out for the evening hadn’t prompted me to pick up the phone and call Sameer or one of my school friends to make dinner plans. But I didn’t appreciate Mariam pointing that out to me.

Four years later I allowed myself to consider the possibility that I was entirely peripheral to that night’s story. Let’s suppose – as suppositions go this is none too farfetched – that Masood heard of his father’s death that night, and not the morning after. Evidence? He burnt the naans. Masood never burnt anything. So let’s suppose he heard of his father’s death – it was the night of a dinner, everyone was congregated in the drawing room, out of earshot of the phone – everyone except for Masood. So the phone in the kitchen rang, and Masood answered, and minutes later Mariam walked into the kitchen. I’m not making this last part up. She was in the kitchen, I know, because she’s the one who told me the naans were burnt. I was walking to my room, was in between the drawing room and my room, when Mariam came out of the kitchen. If only I could remember, but I can’t, if something prompted me to ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ or if she just held out a burnt bit of naan to me.

Mariam loved Masood and Masood loved Mariam and Masood loved his father and his father died and Masood hung up the phone and Mariam walked into the kitchen and the house was full of people and Mariam knew that among those people were people who might walk into the kitchen, maybe to see what Masood was cooking, maybe to see where Mariam had gone, maybe to ask for more ice. And Masood knew that all he wanted right then was to weep in Mariam’s arms.

Is that when the naans burnt? Or was that later, seconds later, when Mariam finally put a hand on his arm, but kept her face turned slightly towards the door, alert for footsteps, and Masood said, ‘This can’t go on. I’ll go mad. We’ll both go mad.’

I can’t fault Mariam for listening for all those footsteps, all those footsteps including mine. But there was a time when I thought that if Masood meant something to me I would fault her for what she did to him all those years. But, really, what did she do except love him, and love us also? Did I fault him? Yes, for months. Yes, for everything. Until one day I was able to say to myself, What did he do except love her and love her?

Sameer brushed a crumb off my cheek. ‘You know you’ll never see her again.’

I stood up and walked over to the glass doors which led out to the garden. Pushed aside the curtains and pressed my head against the glass. The chairs on the terrace were covered in dust.

Karachi was full of corners, and I had grown up turning every corner with the hope in my heart that she would be there. How could I continue to live my life between such corners? How could I not?

Other people never reminded me of Mariam, but that’s not to say I was never reminded of her. In moments when I least expected it everyday objects would become doorways to memory. A shoe buckle, a keyring, a mango seed bleached by the sun; running water, railway tracks, cobblestones and cochineal; cacti, cat’s-eyes, Cocteau and kites; chipped plates, race tracks, swimming pools, diving boards, bluebottles, jellyfish, bougainvillea, stones; crickets and bats and cricket bats.

I know. Cocteau is not an everyday object, but she loved Orphée.

What if she were dead? How would I know? Is it better this way, this not knowing? I wondered, tracing circles in the glass. This way she can be immortal to me, in my lifetime. I don’t ever have to face the finality of her death. That thought should have brought me comfort, but it didn’t. If she were dead, I’d want to know so that I could weep. The circles in the glass looped outward and became spirals. I am frozen when I think of you, Mariam. My mind goes everywhere and nowhere. Nothing in my life is untouched by your absence. I think you’d like Khaleel. I don’t know if that makes me run towards him or pull away.

‘Aliya, what did your father mean that day over lunch? Remember, just after you got back? I escorted Abida Nani out and when I came back he was saying, “I should have fired Masood when …” and then your mother told him to shut up.’

‘I don’t know.’ I had forgotten about that entirely.

Sameer stood up. ‘I’m going to find your mother. Maybe she’ll tell us. You can use my absence to read that e-mail which you’re so desperate for me not to see.’

He left, and I turned gratefully to my laptop.

Hi, Ailment.

Your e-mail about tea at the Starcheds’ had me in hysterics! Seriously. Someone rang the bell and I couldn’t answer it because I was having such a haal picturing Older Starch stuffing food into the older Ali Shah’s mouth to stop him from charming you. But obviously you don’t want to hear any of this, as your last message so subtly hinted. ‘How’s Baji? Have you seen her recently?’ my foot. Why don’t you just come right out and say Cal Butt has hoovered you off your ankles? So, everyone loves him, if that’s what you want to know, but, after he left, Baji (who somehow detected your interest in him, although neither Rehana Apa nor I can recall saying anything about it) said, ‘Of course, you don’t marry an individual. You marry a family.’ Normally I would roll my eyes at this marriage phoo-pha; I mean, flings can be great fun, and if it wasn’t for you I’d fling him in a second. But you’ve never shown signs of being able to do that one-day-at-a-time thing and frankly Liaquatabad should stop you from thinking long-term. I’ve gathered enough info from him to know that his Karachi relatives’ English is weak, they’ve never left the country, and they believe in the joint-family system (the horror, the horror; imagine living in a house teeming with your own relatives, never mind someone else’s). I know he lives in America (claims he wants to get a job that’ll let him travel the globe), but if you and he end up together there’ll have to be family interaction in Karachi and that will be a disaster, the fallout from which will not leave you unscathed at all! Call me a snob if you want to, but what the hell do any one of us have to say to the great mass of our compatriots? We can talk about cricket and complain about the politicians, but then what? I’m not denying that they could be wonderful people, but that’s really not the point.