Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  Karim cleared his throat, and I shifted slightly away from him, watching his bare toes curl around a twig in the mud.

  ‘We’re really sick, aren’t we?’ he said. ‘Wanting riots to continue just so school can remain closed.’

  I scratched my knee and tried to look repentant, but really I was thinking that the riots had to stop, they absolutely had to, else we’d be sent away over the holidays. None of what was going on in Karachi made much sense to me—not since last year when that girl was killed by a speeding bus and you’d think that was a domestic tragedy, her poor family, and also, I wondered, what must go on in the head of the driver, who certainly didn’t intend to kill a girl but now had to live with the consequences of his recklessness, but instead of being a family tragedy it all ignited a terrible ethnic fight. The girl Muhajir, the bus driver Pathan, and somehow, somehow, that became the issue, though my mother said ‘a catalyst, no more’ and Uncle Ali said, ‘all being orchestrated to create divisions and factions’, and my father responded, ‘Don’t the fools know these things can’t be contained’, while Aunty Maheen kept talking about ‘the perils of amnesia’. Lots of people looked at her strangely when she said that. But Karim and I were thirteen; there was nothing we could do about the nation’s problems, so why not stick to issues that perhaps we did have some control over?

  I poked Karim in the stomach. ‘We need a p.o.a.’ I said. ‘To stop them from sending us off to milk feudal cows.’

  Karim adopted the voice of our maths teacher. ‘The probability of success regarding a plan of action employed by two thirteen-year-olds against their parents is what? (a) one in one thousand; (b) two in three thousand; (c) too small to bother calculating.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Karimazov. Forget maths and come up with a plan.’ From between the hibiscus branches I saw Uncle AH flick an insect out of his wife’s hair. Aunty Maheen looked startled, and then smiled, and they regarded each other curiously, as though they hadn’t seen one another in a very long time. For no reason at all, I felt suddenly gleeful, and I punched Karim’s shoulder. ‘Come on! Think of Miandad hitting that six off Sharma. If he could do that, you can do this.’

  ‘Miandad wasn’t thirteen, and Chetan Sharma wasn’t his mother.’

  ‘Final ball of the innings, Karim! Four runs needed to win! And Miandad at bat. Six runs the moment that ball left the willow. Come on, Karim. Think.’

  ‘Why don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m the brawn.’

  Which was true. At the time, I was about four inches taller than Karim and, just weeks earlier, in front of our whole class, I had lifted him off his feet and deposited him in the waste-paper basket during one of his bouts of recalcitrance. Of course, he had rescued himself from embarrassment by refusing to step out until Mr Ansari, our science teacher, walked in, whereupon Karim said, ‘You were right, sir, last week when you said I am rubbish. Please pray for me so that I might be spared the destiny of pencil shavings.’ Poor Mr Ansari stood speechless while the class dissolved into laughter around him.

  But even as I was laughing I knew Karim was not playing for attention, but for justice. Mr Ansari really had called Karim ‘rubbish’ the week before, after finding Karim in the library looking at ‘a dirty picture’. That is to say, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.

  So when the school principal walked past our class en route to teaching mathematics to Class 9-K, and saw Mr Ansari standing red-faced and ineffectual amid thirty-one laughing students, I knew it wasn’t coincidence, but timing. Only afterwards did it occur to me that Karim couldn’t have timed the whole thing, because he didn’t know I was going to deposit him in the waste-paper basket. Or did he?

  Three days later Karim apologized to Mr Ansari. He told me his sense of justice had evolved beyond revenge.

  At thirteen we were all given to saying things that sounded as if we were trying too hard to grow up.

  But that October day in the garden, when Karim said, ‘Nope, sorry, no p.o.a. comes to mind’, we were forced to face our status as children and accede to the tyranny of adults. Our only hope was that Ami’s sense of propriety—which we regarded as rubbish—would win the day.

  ‘You’re going,’ Aba said, nearly an hour later.

  Karim and I looked round at the four grown-ups, trying to find some sign of relenting, but they had that look of solidarity which can only belong to four people who have switched partners without missing a step or treading on a toe.

  ‘Do we have to call Aunty Laila’s new husband “Uncle” even though he is a decadent feudal?’ I asked.

  My parents blanched.

  My sense of justice was not as evolved as Karim’s.

  Less than two months later Karim and I boarded a train bound for farmland, with the decadent feudal’s brother along as an ‘in-charge’, though I swear I heard my mother refer to him as a chaperon. Of course, when I confronted her about this she said, ‘Don’t be a silly-billy, I didn’t say chaperon. I sneezed.’ And for weeks afterwards she made her sneezes sound like ‘a-chaperoo’, to the point when it became normal and she couldn’t sneeze in any other way even if she tried.

  The journey to Rahim Yar Khan was an overnight one, and we were booked into two adjoining compartments, though each compartment slept four. Decadent Feudal’s brother pretended to insist that Karim sleep within the same four walls as him, but when Karim slipped next door—ostensibly to borrow a book to read—Uncle Chaperoo (as we had already named him) pretended not to notice the length of his absence until the next morning.

  What is it about a train charging down the tracks? Buses, planes, cars, boats—I was blasé about all of them before I even knew what blasé meant. But that evening when the train pulled out of the station, I leaned out of the window like someone in a film and waved madly to anyone who cared to look. And I sang! I wanted a song appropriate to the moment but only ‘Feed the World ‘ came to mind, so I sang that and didn’t care that the coolies laughed at me and a beggar flung a handful of peanuts in my direction.

  Maybe I’d been watching too many movies.

  ‘No,’ Karim said, flinging himself on the lower bunk and rolling up the blinds. ‘It’s not Hollywood association that sets your heart racing. It’s the sound of the train. Dhug-dhug. Dhug-dhug.’

  ‘Ker-chug. Ker-chug,’ I argued.

  ‘Well, something iambic.’

  Mr Intellectual.

  I lay down on the top bunk. The black vinyl stuck to my skin and I imagined how it would feel if the boy on the lower bunk opposite me were Zia, not Karim. Zia with his fake driver’s licence, Marlboro cool, thick lashes and curly hair. Zia who said that the point of smoking was to draw attention to your lips. Which I was quite happy to do, except Karim said he’d tell my parents.

  I blew imaginary smoke rings in the air and said, ‘Why do you have to be so annoying sometimes?’

  Karim continued to look out of the train window. ‘Can’t help it. It’s the company I keep.’

  I propped myself up on my elbow, trying not to imagine to whom or what else the vinyl had clung in the past. The bed-sheets that Ami had packed for the journey were in Uncle Chaperoo’s compartment, but I could hear him singing wedding songs through the wall that separated his bed from mine, and it seemed impolite to intrude. So instead I turned off the overhead light and watched Karim’s reflection in the window while shadows of trees and tracks and rural stations passed over his face and the moon glowed in his hair. All the while, his finger traced station names on to his arm, left to right and right to left, impossible to say if he was writing Urdu or inverted-English, English or reflected Urdu. I thought, no, there’s no one I would rather be here with than my best friend, my one-time crib companion, my blood-brother (or spit-brother; sputum being the fluid we chose to mingle in a cup and ingest), no one else who will catch me if I fall out of this top bunk, catch me not because of quick reflexes but because of anticipation.

  When I finally slept, I dreamt I was on a train.

  . . .

 
; ‘Sugar cane thataway, kinoos thisaway, cotton everywhichaway.’ The decadent feudal, Uncle Asif, pointed his walking-stick in the direction of his crops, all of which were hidden from us by the wall of trees and bushes that separated the creeper-covered house and its garden from the rest of the farm. ‘I suggest a walk. If you get lost, we’ll launch a dramatic rescue operation complete with local police, hunting dogs and a few snake charmers for added rural colour.’

  ‘We’ve got snake charmers in Karachi.’ Karim’s tone was sulky. This I had not anticipated, though I was usually so in tune with his moods that I would often claim emotions and realize, hours later, that really they belonged to him. But all the way from the railway station to the house I had been so captivated by Uncle Asif’s charm that it didn’t occur to me that Karim’s reaction might differ from mine. How could anyone fail to be won over by raccoon-eyed, pillow-bellied, pear-headed Uncle Asif?

  ‘Oh, those snake and mongoose fights at the beach! All fakes! The snakes are defanged, poor buggers, so that the cute little mongooses—mongeese? mongii?—can win every time.’

  ‘Everyone knows that,’ Karim said. I stepped on his foot and smiled at Uncle Asif, my mouth barely bearing up under the pressure of being charming for two. My lips were already beginning to chap in the cold, dry air, and I was afraid if I smiled with any greater force they would split open.

  ‘Is Aunty Laila here?’ I said.

  Uncle Asif lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘The snake charmer came and spirited her away in the dead of night.’ He straightened up and grinned at me. ‘But he’ll bring her back by lunch. She left instructions that you should eat, shower and call your parents the second you arrive, but since the second has passed and we’re still out on the veranda you’re free to stretch your legs and other body parts also. Just be back in an hour, OK?’ He waggled his cane at someone I couldn’t see, and walked off towards the sugar-cane fields.

  ‘Well, he’s an oddity,’ Karim said, as we turned away from the house and cut through the long, manicured garden with its beds of chrysanthemums and roses.

  ‘And you, as Sonia might say, are an idioddity. What are you being so moody about?’ I had the longer legs, but I was struggling to keep up with him as he strode from the garden on to the surrounding path and from there charged, head down, into the bushes.

  There was, just feet away, a two-person-wide opening in the bushes to allow for easy access between house and crops but I was just old enough to worry that I might be turning ladylike, so I ignored the opening and followed Karim. He must have known I was behind him but this didn’t stop him from pushing aside a pliant bit of foliage, stepping forward and letting go. The green and prickly thing lurched towards me and I had to put my arms up to fend it off. ‘What the hell, Karim?’

  ‘Walking, not talking, is a good idea.’ He stepped out from the bushes and didn’t even stop to take in the sight of those acres of crops rolling towards a distant shroud of mist, but merely continued walking along the mud-path that bordered the cotton, head still down.

  This was all very strange. Surliness was my thing in those days. I could summon it up over an egg. All because of the tyranny of bras, I now believe. I had yet to reconcile myself to a lifetime of being so strapped in at the chest. But, my point being, Karim was the peacemaker, the even-tempered one, the joker who dared me to stay sullen in the face of his wit. Look, he’d said once, holding up a five-rupee mask of Sly Stallone in Rambo headband looking peculiarly Pakistani, it’s the face of my wit. He slipped it over my head. Stay sullen in it. I dare you! Rambo Rehman. Rambunctious. Ram Boloo Pehlvan.

  In the middle of the path he came to a stop and closed his eyes. There was a faint roar of farm equipment in the distance. ‘That’s the sound of waves breaking,’ Karim said, with an extraordinary leap of imagination. He raised an arm and started jabbing at the air. ‘There’s Zia’s beach hut, and there’s Runty’s hut. There’s the cave where Zia goes to smoke, there’s the place where we saw the baby turtle, there’s the steep cliff we thought we’d never be able to climb, there’s Portal Karim and Portal Raheen, and Sonia Rock is almost lost in the gloom, and there’s where my parents built a sand castle together two years ago.’ He dropped his arm, his eyes scrunched tight.

  Well, I decided, whatever’s bothering him, either he’ll tell me about it or he’ll forget about it. I quickened my step and edged past him. For a few seconds the distance between us widened, and then somehow we were side by side again, our feet stepping in time to ‘Left, right, left right, pyjama dheela, topi tight.’ We walked past cottonfields, past buffaloes wallowing in pools of water, past goats, past chickens, past grass greener than any green in Karachi, past more cottonfields, always more cottonfields, and I thought for the first time how strange it was that we never walked in Karachi, not from Karim’s house to mine, not from Sind Club to the Gymkhana, not from anywhere to anywhere except at the beach, and even there you could walk only so far before water or rocks or crabs indicated, Enough now. Go back.

  On our return to the house, Karim picked a chicken claw off the ground. ‘This could be a starfish,’ he said. ‘It should be. We should be home. Planning a trip to the beach. We should be home. Doesn’t it bother you that we’re not?’

  ‘Home is an anagram of “oh, me!” Such a dramatic cry. Speaking of which, why are you being the one-minute version of Drama Hour for no reason? This is a holiday; it’s cool. We can wander around and explore and stuff. Besides, no one’s going to get permission to go to the beach these days, not with all the violence and stuff.’

  ‘Karachi is an anagram of “hack air”.’ He pulled a penknife out of his pocket and slashed at the wind. Women in bright clothes with makeshift cloth bags full of cotton slung over their shoulders walked past and pointed towards us, giggling. I felt oddly foreign.

  ‘Karimazov?’

  ‘Just mindless violence,’ he said, snapping the blade closed. ‘Doesn’t it bother you that we’re here because our parents don’t feel we’re safe at home?’

  I shrugged. Our first time away from our parents, and he had to go and do the whole concerned-citizen-of-a-city-in-turmoil bit on me. Imagine if in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the four children sat around saying, ‘We’re here because there are air-raids in London. How terrible!’ They’d never even make it up the stairs, let alone into the wardrobe, with that kind of attitude. I thought of mentioning this to Karim, but we’d decided that it was time to grow out of the Narnia books the previous year, and he might have laughed at my childishness had I invoked them. So instead I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with spending a few days in this place.’

  He looked at me as though I were very stupid. ‘He thinks changing locations can alter things,’ he said.

  ‘He who? Your father? Well, so what? It can, can’t it? Sometimes. Depending on the things.’ I began to feel I had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘But when we go back nothing will have changed.’ He tossed the claw away from him with a jerk, as though just realizing it was part of a dead animal. ‘What does he think he’s protecting me from?’

  ‘Bullets and bombs. Come on, Cream, it’s not so bad here.’

  He turned away from me and rubbed his hands across his eyes. Probably tired from the journey, I told myself. But he’d fallen asleep before me on the train and woken up only when I woke him up. I knew I should ask him what really was the matter, not just today, but nearly every day for the last few weeks, or was it months? We were all beginning to surprise ourselves with our reactions to the world in those days, anger flaring up for no reason and solitude becoming a sought-after state in which we’d find ourselves thinking about things that formerly would have made us clump together in groups to giggle. So it would have been easy to dismiss Karim’s moments of rage towards his father as nothing more than a manifestation of adolescence, and it seemed almost everyone did dismiss it as exactly that—Sonia and Zia did, and so did my parents, and even Uncle Ali was wont to respond to Karim’s scowls with som
e exasperated comment about ‘boys at that age’, while Aunty Maheen sighed. But there was a gravity to Karim’s anger, a sense of cause and effect, some terrible notion of consequence. Did no one but me see that? While the rest of us were still just changing, Karim was maturing.

  ‘When we drove into the farm I thought I was seeing snow for the first time,’ I said, leaning forward and speaking softly into his ear as he looked out at a distant point in the cottonfields. ‘But really it’s tired clouds, coming to rest on the ground.’

  He turned away from whatever he was staring at to smile at me, and encircled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. He was much smaller than I was in those days, but my wrist fitted perfectly into the ‘O’ created by his clasp. Then he cut across to the cottonfield, his feet squelching in the mud. He pulled a cotton boll out of its pod and walked back to where I was standing. ‘Here. I found you an angel in disguise.’ Sitting on the top of the cotton was a ladybird. Karim touched the cotton to my hand and the ladybird crawled off on to my palm. I wanted to hug Karim then, but was surprised to find myself imagining my breasts pressing against his chest, and so instead I just looked down at the ladybird and wondered out loud, if I touch its back will my finger come away red? The back became wings and the ladybird swooped off my hand.

  There was more swooping a few hours later when Aunty Laila found Karim and me sitting at one end of the long dining table pulling faces at our reflections in the polished wood surface. ‘Darlings!’ she cried, descending upon us with arms outstretched, and coming to rest in a crouch between our intricately carved chairs. Her arms locked themselves around our necks and she pulled us close in a sudden gesture so that our faces almost bounced off her cheekbones. She pursed her Lancome-enhanced lips into kisses that were presumably intended to ricochet off the opposite wall and on to our cheeks. Ami once said that no one, least of all Aunty Laila, knew where the boundaries existed between Aunty Laila’s parody of Karachi high society and her genuine embodiment of the characteristics of a Karachi Knee.