In the City by the Sea

by Kamila Shamsie

  In the City by the Sea

  KAMILA SHAMSIE

  For my parents

  Muneeza and Saleem

  and my sister,

  Saman

  And as I love you, the pines in the wind

  Want to sing your name with their leaves of wire

  Pablo Neruda

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Acknowledgements

  Epilogue

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Prologue

  Newspapers kill.

  At the thought, Hasan’s lips stretched into the first-thing-in-the-morning smile which broke his mouth out of its sleep-imposed mould. Before the smile had achieved its potential smugness, Hasan’s right hand was already moving. Fingers spread to cover maximum area, the hand reached down to the carpet, skimmed over tea-burn, yo-yo string and dried glue splotch, and bundled yesterday’s comic page, sports section, TV listings and local politics page into a mass of fly swat. Hasan raised his weapon and waited, motionless. Thwack! His posterior jerked in remonstration at the ferocity of the assault.

  ‘The rear forces have been decimated,’ Hasan announced. ‘But they gave their lives willingly in order to destroy the enemy.’ He inspected the newspaper bundle. ‘The enemy has been squashed.’

  Hasan turned over on his back and something fluttered on to the sheet, beside his thigh. He touched his forefinger to the tip of his tongue and used the damp digit to lift the object off the sheet and hold it up to the shaft of sunlight that breached the curtains. Translucent, multi-veined gauze of onion sliver. Hasan sighed, and the wing blew off his finger, twirling in unencumbered flight. Hasan had a fleeting notion of raiding all the neighbourhood kitchens for onions, which he would unravel and stitch together into giant wings, but then he recalled that he couldn’t stitch. Plus, there was the smell factor to take into account.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, extricating himself from his cocoon of sheets and peering under the bed. ‘Only one week to midterm holidays, Yorker,’ he announced to the stuffed toy with smiling cricket-ball head and batsman’s garb which lay sprawled atop a pair of sneakers. Yorker’s smile had come unstitched at one end, giving him a downturned pout that made Hasan instantly guilty as he recalled his failure to stand up to his cousin Najam’s taunts the previous evening.

  ‘Okay, sorry,’ he said, placing Yorker on his bed. ‘Most stuffed toys are for babies, but you’re different. And I’ll say as much to the next fourteen-year-old idiot who tries to insult you.’ Hasan pushed up the corner of Yorker’s mouth and fixed it in place with a thumb tack. ‘Look, a dimple!’

  Hasan swung himself out of bed. ‘One week more,’ he repeated, enunciating the words to the point of distortion. He closed his eyes to savour each syllable, feel the inrush of air and swelling of cheeks to ‘one’, taste the explosion of ‘weekkkk’ in the back of his mouth, smell the drawn-out exhalation of ‘more’. Smell the drawn-out exhalation? Hasan wrinkled his nose. No, that was morning breath. He ran his tongue over his gums, regretting his decision not to brush his teeth the night before so that he could awaken with the taste of rubri still in his mouth.

  I must be getting old, he thought. I’m worrying about hygiene.

  The notion was so distressing that Hasan resolved not to brush his teeth for the rest of the weekend, but then he happened to look across at the cluster of posters stuck with studied haphazardness on the wall above his desk. Amidst all the poses of all the figures in open-collared white shirts and white trousers, one stood out. Hasan’s favourite cricketer, that magician with his willow wand, square-cutter of the full-toss, driver of the outswinger, sweeper of the googly: Raza ‘Razzledazzle’ Mirza. In the poster Razzledazzle was bereft of both his bat and his famous reversible two-fingered gesture of victory or abuse. Instead he held up a toothpaste box emblazoned ‘Plaqattaq’ and beamed ear to ear, revealing whiter-than-nature-intended teeth. ‘Get yourself a full set of cricketing whites’ the slogan advised.

  Hasan trudged to the bathroom.

  Minutes later, scrubbed and dressed in kurta and jeans, Hasan switched off the air-conditioner, and hopskipjumped out of his bedroom. In the hallway, Ami’s Reclining Nude had been replaced by Still Life with Flowers, one of the many paintings gifted to Ami by exhibitors at her gallery and subsequently relegated to the storeroom.

  Hasan put his need for breakfast on hold, and poked his head into his parents’ room. ‘Who’s coming over?’ he whispered.

  Aba reached over to his bedside table with his left hand, felt around for his stopwatch, scribbled something into the morning paper’s crossword grid, paused the stopwatch, and looked up at Hasan. ‘Client,’ he mouthed.

  ‘Conservative type?’ Hasan said, gesturing towards the still life in the hall.

  ‘I am to be seen, through a cracked open door, kneeling on my prayer-mat when he arrives,’ Ami said, her eyes flickering open.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Aba. ‘You’re to serve tea, and ask how else you might be of assistance, keeping in mind your female limitations. Ow! Ouch! Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!’

  Ami kept a tuft of Aba’s hair twisted around her index finger, but stopped pulling it. ‘Is he grovelling?’

  Hasan shook his head. ‘Just begging. Give him another second or so.’ He darted out of the room before Aba’s cry of ‘Ingrate!’ could thump him between the shoulder blades.

  In the kitchen, someone who was either the new cook or a thief was piling the dining room silver – fruit bowl, tea-set with elongated teapot, cake-slicer, horse figurine, candelabra – on to a table, his back towards the door. Hasan skulked in the doorway. Or tried to. He wasn’t quite sure what ‘skulk’ meant, but the configuration of letters suggested ‘to sneak like a skull’. Hasan sucked in his cheeks and crouched low, beneath a grown man’s eye level. The man whipped out a rag and silver polish from a cabinet.

  ‘I’m Hasan,’ Hasan said in Urdu, advancing into the kitchen. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘I am.’

  ‘God is great,’ Hasan said, with the confidence of someone who knows he has the last word. He procured a glass of milk, an empty bowl and a whole pomegranate from fridge, crockery cabinet and, after some searching, spice cupboard, and pushed through the screen door.

  The sun was ferocious, a taste of the summer months ahead. Along the boundary wall purple, orange and pink bougainvillaea flowers drooped their heads and attempted to curl beneath their own leaves, and the hibiscus flowers in the back garden let hang their pollen-tipped tongues. Hasan’s jeans clung to his legs as he made his way to the back garden and up the spiral staircase to the roof.

  The mali next door saw Hasan sit cross-legged and sweating beneath the overhang of the rooftop water-tank, and turned his garden hose away from Uncle Latif’s prize chikoo trees. He pointed the hose upward and pressed his thumb against the hose’s mouth, constricting and rechannelling the flow of water. Two streams of sun-sparkling
transparency spurted out from the sides of the hose and arced towards Hasan. The cement roof hissed on impact; snakes of dust stirred, but the steady jet beat them down. Hasan ducked his head in thanks, raised the pomegranate above his head and smashed it against the cement.

  A crack, surrounded by a purple bruise, ran down the leathery covering. Hasan squeezed his thumbs into the crack and prised the pomegranate apart. There – hundreds of teardrops encasing teardrops, crimson flesh offering no resistance and much enticement to teeth which would bite down and hit a seed that only teased with its hardness before revealing its brittleness. Hasan did not have the patience to scrape each segment from the bitter strip which held it in place. He raised one half of the pomegranate to his mouth, clamped down his teeth, felt the first explosion of juice into his mouth, and saw the boy.

  The boy stood on a rooftop the next street over – within ball-throwing range if you had a good arm, and Hasan did. The boy looked about Hasan’s age, slightly taller perhaps, though that impression could have been created by the thickness of his sneakers’ soles. He was too intent on attempting to fly his yellow kite to notice Hasan, but the mere fact of the boy’s presence at an elevation Hasan considered his own in the early morning hours was enough to make Hasan put the pomegranate down and wipe his mouth.

  Little gusts of wind blew past the boy, making the kite hiccup through failed take-offs.

  The water on the roof evaporated; the sun inched a little closer to Hasan; pomegranate stains turned rusty on jeans; the glass of milk warmed in Hasan’s grip. Still the boy tried to bring his kite to life. And just when his shoulders seemed to slump a breeze blew up from the sea.

  ‘Yes!’ Hasan exclaimed, jumping up with upstretched arms.

  The kite shivered and rose. The boy ran backwards on his roof, unreeling string, yelling ‘Up, Razzledazzle, up’ as the paper rhombus dipped and recovered, dipped and recovered. Suddenly everything depended on the kite. Dynasties would fall, wars would break out, next Friday would never arrive if the kite did not rise to string-tautening heights. Hasan knew that and, he was sure, so did the boy. While the boy continued to move backwards in his most enviable sneakers, Hasan puffed out his cheeks and blew in the kite’s direction. The two boys, as one, willed that kite up, not for one moment turning their eyes away – not to blink away the sun, not to look at the birds wheel past, not to see who was crying out below.

  Not even to watch for the roof to end.

  Chapter One

  Despite the strangeness and uncertainty that pervaded his Mamoo’s house that mid-term holiday, what Hasan was to remember most vividly about the visit was the smell of pine-cones. The moment Aba turned the Honda Accord on to the street where his brother-in-law lived, the smell hit Hasan and quite overpowered the mingled scent of sea-air, garbage, eucalyptus and dust that no one in the City by the Sea ever noticed until it disappeared.

  Hasan had never even seen a pine-cone before, but he recognized the smell by its resemblance to the air-freshener his neighbour and old family friend, Uncle Latif, had sprayed under Hasan’s nose.

  ‘Here, smell this,’ Uncle Latif had said, pressing down, and down again, on the green spray-can when he learned that Hasan was going to stay with Salman Mamoo. ‘Number one air-freshener, pine-scented, manufactured by Latifbhai Private Limited, and ready to take the market by storm. When you hurry and scurry down the road to your mamoo’s house and smell the pines you will marvel at how successfully I have captured Nature in a spray-can. I mean, all respect to God and everything, but when news of Salman Haq’s pine-cone phenomenon first entered these ears I thought, Latif, what is the point of having this glorious smell up in the mountains when the majority of this country’s noses are down in the city? Hanh?’

  In truth, the air-freshener resembled the real smell of pines only in so far as sweet, oval-shaped or circular, rich brown in colour, dripping with syrup, soft but not mushy, delicious hot or cold, could resemble the actual eating of a gulab jamun. And, yes, Hasan would have been able to identify the pine smell even without the air-freshener. For he, too, had heard the stories of Salman Mamoo’s supporters and how they had a complex, secret network that transported pine-cones down from the hills around his real home, his heart’s home, and catapulted them from rooftops into his garden in the City by the Sea.

  Hasan was grateful for the smell. It made him feel as though Ami, Aba and he were somewhere different, somewhere not home, and dulled the incongruity of packing bags and locking house in order to go and stay with an uncle who lived only a five-minute drive away from home. Five minutes. But this time it had taken three months to make the drive over. Three months, almost to the day, since the radio newscaster confirmed what everyone in the City already knew, and Uncle Latif clicked his tongue and said to Hasan: ‘Oh, this is the news to give us the blues. I think your lunch at Salman’s has been cancelled. Or rather, for I am an optimist, particularly in the presence of children, let us say it has been postponed.’

  Hasan had never before known the need for presidential approval in order to reschedule a lunch with one’s uncle.

  He stuck his head out of the window and watched white, beige, cream cement boundary walls and white, black, grey steel gates whiz past, their bleakness relieved by roadside grass patches, flower pots, laburnum trees, palm trees and the omnipresent bougainvillaea. Of the single-storied houses only the flat roofs could be seen, rising above the wall. Even so, the hours he had spent looking down from Salman Mamoo’s roof allowed Hasan to dissolve walls and nod hello to the goldfish in the rockery pool at no. 7, smile at the girl endlessly hitting a squash ball off the back wall at no. 10/1, shake his head in admiration at the BMW, Nissan Patrol and (for the servants’ use) Honda Civic at no. 17–19.

  But after the road curved to the left past no. 23 the walls could really have dissolved, the goldfish could have smoked cigarettes and serenaded sparrows, the girl could have swallowed the squash ball and the cars could have danced the tango, and Hasan would barely have noticed. Well, certainly the girl could have swallowed the squash ball and Hasan would barely have noticed. At any rate, having borne the three-month separation from his uncle with a restraint which surprised even him, it now required all his will power to keep still in the back seat of the car, for his legs were insisting that they could run down the road to Salman Mamoo’s house, run faster than any five-year-old-car which had to slow for speed-bumps.

  ‘Aba!’ Hasan reached over to the driver’s seat to shake his father’s shoulder, as the house came – or rather, didn’t come – into view. ‘What’s happened to Salman Mamoo’s wall?’

  ‘It’s profitable to be a building contractor in favour with the government these days, Hasan. The government puts someone under house-arrest, and you double the height of his wall to increase that prison sensation. And all at the prisoner’s expense. Ah, our glorious law-enforcers!’

  ‘Shehryar!’ Ami warned.

  There they were. Olive shirts, grey trousers, upturned moustaches. Hasan had imagined all that. But he had imagined, too, that there would be more of them. A whole squad at least, standing erect and suspicious, rifles at the ready, their eyes hollowed like the President’s and their mouths as disinclined as his to smile. Instead, there were only three. Two standing to either side of the gate – the sags of their shoulders suggesting that their postures would not last very long – their rifles leaning on the wall beside them; the other seated on a steel fold-up chair with his left arm thrown over the back, the index finger of his right hand propping up his rifle. A song from a popular film was blaring from a radio that Hasan couldn’t see. He wished that Aba had not refused for all these months to drive past Salman Mamoo’s house. The reality proved so much less threatening than his imagining.

  But as soon as Hasan thought that, Aba swung the car round to face the gate.

  Hasan had memorized Salman Mamoo’s gate long, long ago. When Salman Mamoo was absent from the City for long stretches during the summer, Hasan would recall the latticed black metal
grilles that formed the gate, and draw them on a piece of paper from Ami’s sketch pad. Six horizontal strips, eight vertical strips, forming thirty-five rectangles. Every rectangle but one had a name which Hasan culled from The Book of Myths. So, if you looked through Thor you could see the drainpipe near the garage, which spurted great gushes of water during the monsoons; through Apollo, the mango tree which Nana had once leaned against while singing ghazals, in the only memory Hasan had of him; through Kali, the patch of driveway where Hasan had fallen while roller-skating and left so much blood that Aba had to keep the garden hose trained on the spot for a full ten seconds before all traces were washed away; and finally, when Hasan had imagined the thirty-four named rectangles he would allow himself to think of the thirty-fifth which framed the doorway where Salman Mamoo always stood in Hasan’s memory.

  But now a sheet of steel had been welded on to the gate, and each rectangle led Hasan’s gaze to impenetrable blackness.

  Aba rolled down the car window and passed a letter to the seated army guard. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘From the President.’ He saluted.

  The guard held the letter close to his face, and began to pick his teeth with a corner of the paper.

  ‘Please,’ Ami said. ‘He’s my brother. Let us in.’

  The guard peered in at Ami, and started with surprise, hitting his head on the window-frame. Hasan smiled to himself. Ami looked so much like Salman Mamoo with her slight features, high cheekbones, and coal eyes that it was not uncommon for guards who were meant to keep Salman Mamoo inside or out of a place to wonder momentarily if Ami were Salman Mamoo in some elaborate disguise.

  Another guard walked over, took the letter from the first and read it through. ‘Yes, fine,’ he said. ‘We were told to expect you. Excuse him – he doesn’t know how to behave around ladies.’ He saluted, prodded the first guard to do the same, and barked out an order for the gates to be opened.

  ‘Sorry, Saira,’ Aba said, his mouth half a smile, half a grimace. ‘Didn’t mean to antagonize him.’