In the City by the Sea

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Why can’t you just break out into a sweat or start trembling like normal people do when they’re nervous?’ Ami said.

  ‘Because you always said you didn’t want to marry a normal man.’

  Ami slapped Aba lightly on the forearm. ‘Drive in, or they’ll close the gates.’

  Salman Mamoo was, as ever, watching them drive in, his body a diagonal in the wood door-frame. But in the scant seconds it took to leap from the car door and cut across driveway and garden into his uncle’s arms, Hasan noticed that he could see the frame of the dove painting inside the house that Salman Mamoo’s body usually obscured completely when he was positioned so.

  ‘Arre, pehlvan, you’ve grown again,’ Salman Mamoo laughed. ‘Sorry I missed your birthday. You’re into double digits now, right?’

  ‘Salman Mamoo!’ Hasan objected. ‘That was last year. I’m eleven now.’

  ‘Oho, Sal-Man, what’s with the hair?’ Aba leaned over Hasan to clasp Salman Mamoo around the shoulders.

  ‘This is what happens when I’m kept away from the mountains in the winter. My supporters throw pine-cones into my garden and God sprinkles snow on to my hair. Hello, girl.’

  The last words were a whisper and he repeated them, softer, as his arms stole around Ami’s waist and his head rested on her shoulder so that it seemed, for a moment, as though Ami’s head was growing backwards from Salman Mamoo’s body. Aba caught Hasan by the shoulder and propelled him indoors. The first thing Hasan noted was that he was finally taller than the potted plant near the doorway and, next, that the white marble floor still bore the stain of a rose petal crushed beneath a stiletto heel, reminder of the celebratory night when Salman Mamoo’s party won the vote of no-confidence. Aba prodded Hasan and together they walked through the wooden double doors into the lounge, hub of the family section, where the rose-water smell of Gul Mumani embraced Hasan a moment before her arms did.

  ‘Gul, Gul, Gul, when I see you my heart is garden, garden,’ Aba sang out.

  ‘Shehryar, Shehryar, Shehryar, you’re making less sense than ever. But looking gorgeous. Have to say it. Look-ing gorgeous! You know, the first time I saw you I remember saying, “That boy has so many waves in his hair he could rival a sea”, and now it looks as though you’re competing with an ocean. But where is . . .? Sairoo!’

  ‘You would think it had been more than a week since they last met,’ Salman Mamoo commented, walking in behind Ami. ‘Gul, don’t suffocate my sister. You know I’ll be blamed for the murder and speedily executed.’

  Gul Mumani glared at him. ‘Listen to him. You would think this was a joke.’

  Aba clapped a hand on Salman Mamoo’s shoulder as the two men sank into adjacent sofas. ‘What, is’t a time to jest and dally now, Salamander?’

  ‘Etymology?’ Salman Mamoo said.

  ‘Salamander. From the Greek, salamandre. First meaning: a mythical animal having the power to endure fire without harm.’

  ‘Oh, I like that! Gul, Saira, Hasan, call me Salamander.’

  ‘Second meaning: a portable stove.’

  ‘Gul, Saira, Hasan, call me Salamander, first meaning.’

  ‘Ignore them, Gul,’ Ami said. She reached over and took the sleeve of Gul Mumani’s kameez between thumb and forefinger. ‘Where did you get this lovely material?’

  Aba and Hasan grinned at each other. However lovely the material, it was the same lemon-yellow as one-fifth of the clothes in Gul Mumani’s wardrobe. When Aba and Gul Mumani were at school together, Aba would taunt Gul Mumani with the nickname ‘Pastel Cannonball’ and though her size and wardrobe had changed since then, her proportions and colour choices had not.

  In the fervour of describing details of how she found a cloth shop when searching for a store that sold egg whisks, and how she bargained with the cloth seller, and goodness! how the tailor nearly wrecked the outfit with the addition of sequined hems, Gul Mumani gesticulated so vigorously the clothes pin on her head sprung off and her hair cascaded down her back. Salman Mamoo and Aba both bit off their smiles, but Hasan could tell that Ami was barely aware of what was going on. Salman Mamoo extended an arm and pulled Ami off the sofa. ‘Come outside,’ he said. ‘There’s something you have to see in about a minute. You too, Hasan.’

  Outside, the clouds were a dragon breathing out a red sun. ‘No, not that,’ Salman Mamoo said, when Hasan pointed at the sky. ‘Wait.’ Inside, the clock chimed one, two, three, four, five, six.

  ‘Now!’

  The sky rained pine-cones.

  Chapter Two

  ‘There’s actually some poor man whose sole purpose in life is to remove the pine-cones from my lawn every evening,’ Salman Mamoo said. ‘Our Beloved Leader’s idea. I hear it’s supposed to show that the government will sweep away any acts of treason, but as far as I’m concerned it just prevents my house from being buried under a mountain of pine-cones. Oh, but just smell that!’

  ‘What happens to the pine-cones?’ Ami asked.

  ‘They’re burned in the empty plot next door. That brings back memories of home, too. Hasan, will you bring a pinecone with you when you come in?’

  Hasan waited for Ami and Salman Mamoo to walk back indoors, then lay down on the pine-cone carpet, his head pillowed on his arms. The pines pricked Hasan’s body. He ran his thumb up and down the ridges of one, over and over, until there was a little red dent in his thumb.

  Facing away from the house as he was, Hasan should have been able to see the sun entering its final stages of descent but the raised walls had diminished the visible sky. Hasan wondered if the moon would haul itself high enough at night to be visible to him. Of course, at school Mrs D. Khan tried to convince Hasan with drawings and charts that his theories about the moon were entirely wrong, but Mrs D. Khan had not been in the desert last summer to see the moon slung so low in the sky that Hasan would have been able to reach up and touch the frost of its rim if he had just had the energy to climb up the farthest sand-dune. During that desert night, huddled around a bonfire with the sand cool beneath his feet, Hasan realized that the moon only ascended as high as was necessary to put itself in skywatchers’ lines of vision. Tonight, would the promise of Hasan’s and Salman Mamoo’s gazes be sufficient to propel the moon up a few extra inches?

  Overhead, a kite fluttered into view. Hasan rolled over and buried his face in the pine-cones.

  Footsteps shuffled behind him. A man with a basket in one hand, a bundle of firm twigs tied together to form a broom in the other, squatted on his haunches in the garden. There was something vaguely crab-like about the way he scuttled forward, one foot at a time. The broom swept a wide arc in front of him, and pushed the pine-cones into a pile in the center of the garden. Hasan turned to go in, but was stopped by a low whistle from the man. Hasan turned back. The man did not look at him, but one foot kicked a pine-cone in Hasan’s direction. Hasan pounced on it, ducked his head in acknowledgement, and ran indoors.

  Gul Mumani was still talking, her voice rising and falling in that familiar melody that changed its tempo with her mood, but only disappeared altogether when she tried to sing. ‘And, so then he came up to me, no! he sidled up to me, that’s the word, and said, why don’t you join us in the other room, we’re having a very interesting political discussion. So I said, na, baba, na, I hate politics. He raised his eyebrows at me, so high I thought they would fly off his scalp, and said, does your husband know you feel this way? And I replied, my dear man, Salman hates politics even more than I do. Saira, when we were eighteen neither of us could ever imagine me saying this, but it gets so tiring, you know, meeting new people, wondering if they are spies or what, always watching your mouth so that you don’t trip over your tongue.’

  The phone rang, and Hasan darted to answer it. He had to cup a hand over one ear and press the receiver against the other ear to hear the voice at the other end through the distortion of wire-taps.

  ‘Arre Hasan, is that you? Uncle Farooq here. Can I have a word with Our Saviour?’

  ‘Uncle
Farooq,’ Hasan said, holding out the receiver towards Salman Mamoo. Ami jumped up from her seat and grabbed Salman Mamoo’s arm. ‘His brother’s marrying into the President’s family,’ she whispered.

  Salman Mamoo shook off Ami’s grasp. ‘For God’s sake, Saira. It’s Farooq.’ He took the receiver from Hasan and yelled into it, ‘Yaar, where have you been, Ooqs, you globetrotter? . . . Thanks, yaar, but it’s not so bad. I’ve got the family with me these days, so we’re having a blast . . . No really . . . Seriously, I’m fine . . . Oh come on, Farooq, that’s not my style. Nothing to be gained by wishing others ill.’ He looked at Ami and shook his head slowly, side to side.

  ‘No, no, nothing of the sort,’ he continued. ‘Actually, I’m finally able to indulge my fantasy of growing my armpit hair . . . Seriously, I oil and braid it every night. You have no idea how much time goes in its upkeep. And the consistency! Go on, Farooq, peel off that T-shirt and have a good look – but only if your deodorant is effective.’ Salman Mamoo grinned at Hasan, and placed a hand over Hasan’s mouth to stifle his giggles. ‘What can I tell you? Gul and I got into a terrible fight the other day because I used her favorite peranda to braid my armpit hair. Look, do me a favour – when you finish this conversation and repeat its details to your brother’s future in-law ask him if he’ll tell my guards to stop harassing Zahoor about the quantities of hair-oil he buys for us from the market each week.’ He disconnected the phone, and sat down. ‘Here, Hasan, lob it over,’ he said.

  Hasan threw the pine-cone upward. It hit the ceiling, bounced down in the center of the room, and somehow Salman Mamoo was lying on the floor, his hand just under the pine-cone. ‘Should have been a cricketer after all,’ he said, picking himself off the ground. He squeezed the pine-cone until the veins stood out on his wrist. ‘This is pine-cone number one hundred. I haven’t decided quite what to do with all of them. Something vaguely artistic, I think. Then, Saira, you can sell it in your gallery as political art. How is the gallery doing?’

  Ami slid one long finger along the rim of her teacup. ‘I’ve closed it down for a while. Concentrating on my own painting. The gallery was taking up too much . . . stop looking at me like that, Saloo.’

  ‘Then stop lying to me.’

  ‘All right. The landlord said there was some problem with the rent agreement, and I would have to close the gallery while he sorted it out, or face eviction.’

  ‘I see.’ Salman Mamoo’s voice was grim, as Hasan had only heard it once before – the day he defined ‘military coup’ over a phone line which started crackling half-way through the conversation. ‘And what exactly was the nature of this rent problem? Your relationship to a certain persona non grata?’

  ‘You can’t blame the landlord, Saloo,’ Ami said in her older sister voice.

  ‘I’m not. I just. . . . for one minute, if I could just . . .’

  ‘Salman!’ Gul Mumani warned.

  ‘Oh, Gul, jaan, I’m not going to say anything incriminating.’

  ‘Why not?’ Hasan said. ‘We won’t tell anyone.’

  ‘I know that, kiddo. But the house is bugged. Although I think I’m not supposed to know that.’

  ‘Bugged?’ Hasan said. ‘Who’s the bugger?’

  Aba and Gul Mumani threw their heads back and roared with laughter. Ami nearly choked on her tea. Salman Mamoo lifted Hasan up, and swung him around. ‘Who’s the bugger?’ he repeated, tears of laughter streaming down his cheek. ‘Oh, that makes another three months of house-arrest bearable. Who’s the bugger, indeed.’

  That night, in the stillness of the bedroom, Hasan felt as though he was surrounded. People in uniform watching him, listening to every breath, wondering why he was not asleep. From the lounge he could hear Salman Mamoo’s and Aba’s voices raised in argument. Hasan picked up an empty glass from the table beside him, crept to the door and interposed the glass between his ear and the door.

  ‘Here’s an aside worth considering,’ Aba said, his voice maddeningly calm. ‘Nostalgia comes from the Greek nostos meaning “homecoming” – don’t interrupt, Solomon, I know you know that. But here’s the interesting part – it’s also probably akin to the Sanskrit nasate which means “he approaches”. So, is nostalgia about return or about standing still and watching someone else return?’

  Salman Mamoo laughed shortly. ‘I suppose you would say the latter. You like to choose the observer option, don’t you, Sherry?’

  Hasan could imagine Aba smiling and raising his eyebrows in appreciation.

  ‘Touché, my friend. And you would like to return home and find everything unchanged, except the things you didn’t like when you left. Oh, Saloo, despite all your acclaimed books about pendular time, you cheat when it comes to your own history. You think you can choose which points on the pendulum’s arc to relive.’

  Hasan rolled his eyes. Grown-up talk!

  Aba went on, ‘Yes, you’ll be your uncle all over again. Same charisma, same ability to innovate, restructure and make alliances. Same everything, except you’re not allergic to prawns so you’ll survive the state banquet and live long enough to implement all your grand plans.’

  ‘What, you’d be happier if I choked on a prawn ball?’ Salman Mamoo laughed.

  ‘Be new,’ Aba said.

  There was a sound of movement. Salman Mamoo leaning forward? Aba reaching over to clasp Salman Mamoo’s shoulder? Salman Mamoo said, ‘I’ve been checking up etymologies too, Shehryar. There’s a third word connected to nostalgia. The Old English word genasas.’

  ‘Genasan,’ Aba corrected him. ‘Yes. Meaning “to escape”’.

  ‘Very tempting when you’re under arrest, wouldn’t you say? Too much reality can kill a man.’

  Hasan returned to bed. He drifted in and out of a strange imagining where he was both himself lying on the bed, saying ‘This is the verge of a dream. You would be dreaming if you were not awake’ and also himself sitting in a room, saying, ‘I tried to sleep, I tried. But when I tried to count sheep they turned into kites.’

  It was hot in the bedroom under the covers, but Hasan knew he would start shivering if he threw off his duvet. The City’s two seasons of Almost-Winter and Absolute-Summer had been coexisting these last few days to create the third season of How-Should-We-Dress? Hasan ran through the list of possible options: T-shirt, shorts, sheet and duvet (present situation – 6/10); sweatshirt, shorts, socks, sheet (forgoing the soon-to-disappear pleasure of sleeping with a duvet – 5/10); shorts, duvet (sleeping shirtless was the kind of thing cousin Najam did to show off the solitary hair growing on his chest –1/10); T-shirt, duvet . . . this is so boring.

  Hasan rose, cracked open a window. Salman Mamoo was standing in the garden, ghostly in his white kurta-shalwar, humming softly. Hasan wriggled into his sneakers, and slid out through the window.

  ‘Is it horrible?’ he said.

  Salman Mamoo did not turn around. ‘Not now, not right now. Right now, if I really wanted to escape I would climb a moonbeam out of here. Climb right up to the stars. You know, before I wanted to be a cricketer, I wanted to be an astronomer.’

  Hasan followed Salman Mamoo’s gaze to the moon. ‘So how old were you when you decided you wanted to be a politician?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it happens.’

  Salman Mamoo picked up a shawl from the chair beside him and draped it round Hasan. They were silent for a while, staring up at the sky. Magic, Hasan thought. When he was younger he used to spend break-time hanging from the goal post at school, convinced that if he grew tall enough he would be able to reach up and touch the sky. Now he was old enough to know the futility of such aspirations, but the sky still enthralled him. During the day it was bland enough, and when the sun blazed through its insipid blueness Hasan usually wanted nothing more than to run indoors and towards creaking fans and humming air-conditioners. But at night! Oh, at night, it was something else entirely. It arced above the earth, majestic, enigmatic, revealing nothing, suggesting everything.

  ‘There are moment
s, Hasan, when I like to think that the stars are bullet-holes. For every bullet shot by an oppressor there springs to life a star, with so great a radiance that it can never be put out, it can never be imprisoned. But if that really were true, the last three months in this city would have erased every trace of blackness from the sky.’ Salman Mamoo tousled Hasan’s hair. ‘Come on, it’s getting cold out here.’

  ‘I’ll crawl back in through the window in a second. Good night, Mamoojaan.’

  Salman Mamoo smiled, and kissed Hasan on the forehead before turning to walk away. A moonbeam slanted in his path on the way back to the house. He walked around it.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Ku-kura-koo. Ku-kura-koo.’

  Hasan swung open the kitchen door and saw Salman Mamoo poking his head out of the window and emitting strange crowing sounds from his throat.

  Over the last three months visitors who arrived unannounced at tea-time to provide comfort to Ami over Salman Mamoo’s predicament invariably and repeatedly insisted that prolonged confinement caused people to go ‘stir crazy’. Consequently, since the mid-term visit had received the presidential stamp of approval Hasan had been steeling himself for, and was quite prepared to face, the sight of Salman Mamoo endlessly mixing cake batter. This manifestation of madness through barnyard imitations, however, made his left ear lobe wriggle. And that hadn’t happened since Uncle Latif had made use of two footballs to dress in drag for a costume party.

  ‘Bloody bird!’ Salman Mamoo declared, slamming the window shut. ‘Tea, Huss?’

  ‘Uh . . . please.’ Hasan sat down on a stool at the kitchen counter. ‘What were you doing?’

  Salman Mamoo shook his head and held a saucepan under the hot water tap. ‘Even the roosters are unpunctual in this city. The one next door used to crow about forty-five minutes after sunrise, and that was bad enough, but since my walls have been raised the bird doesn’t see the sun until midday and bloody hell I’m a rural boy. I can’t take roosters crowing four hours after breakfast. So I try to goad it into ku-karuing with noises of my own.’