Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Runty, sweets!’ Aunty Laila cooed down the phone, her voice entirely at odds with the exaggerated grimaces of distaste that contorted her face. I went to the kitchen to find some chutney for the pakoras, and when I came back Aunty Laila was recounting the tale of Sonia’s father to Runty. ‘...But the guards were illiterate Pathans, so...’

  I said, ‘Why is the phrase “illiterate Pathan” the one constant in every variant of the story? As if he would have been any more capable of deciphering words if he were an illiterate Punjabi or Muhajir.’ I threw it out as though it were a question about semantics, but really I wished I were old enough to talk to Aunty Laila as an equal and say, do you know what you reveal about yourself, and what you perpetuate with such stupidity? I’ve heard you talk about ethnicity, heard it when I was thirteen; it was you and Uncle Asif who first taught me how we can look at our friends and reduce them from individuals to members of some group that our group is at odds with. You made me learn how to derail or diffuse conversations when they headed down certain tracks just so I wouldn’t have to feel that disgust, that disappointment, that still turns my stomach today.

  ‘Well said, Raheen,’ Aba applauded.

  ‘Come on, Zafar,’ said Uncle Asif, waggling his finger at Aba. ‘I know what you want to say. If he were a Muhajir there’s a far greater chance he would have been literate.’

  My hand, reaching for another pakora, froze. What had I gone and started?

  Aba shrugged. ‘Well, yes, that’s simple statistics. The literacy rate of Muhajirs is higher than that of other ethnic groups. I’m not saying this is the way it has to be because of some genetic reason, I’m just saying this is the way it is.’

  Uncle Asif laughed. ‘Poor Karachiites. Living in this spacious, clean, city in ’47 when—whap!—Partition happens and all these immigrants come streaming across the new border, convinced of the superiority of their culture, and whisk away all the best jobs from Sindhis who’d been living here for generations. I’m speaking as a disinterested third party, of course.’

  My father laughed even louder than Uncle Asif had. ‘I’ll let the disinterested bit go for the moment, Asif. But what I won’t sit back and pretend to be unaware of is your obliviousness to the fact that Muhajirs came here leaving everything behind. Our homes, our families, our ways of life. We can’t be blamed if some—mind you, some—of us came from areas with education systems that made us qualified for office jobs instead of latrine-cleaning, which is the kind of job you seem to think immigrants should be grateful for. And as for that term immigrants...’

  He never attacked anyone else, but my father could defend his own with a startling fervour. If he wasn’t Muhajir would he feel their grievances as strongly? If I wasn’t his daughter, would I still believe that his views were justified? What did I really know about rural Sindh, after all? Nothing. Too confusing to accept that the aggrieved could also be the aggressors. Too difficult to untangle the mess of a situation in which there weren’t clear-cut rights and wrongs.

  ‘Oh, now who’s forgetting history! Muhajirs loved being called Muhajirs. Loved the religious connotation of that word, linking them to the Muslims of Mecca who immigrated to Medina with the Prophet. It wasn’t that you weren’t welcome—it’s just that you would have died rather than be absorbed.’

  I could tell Aunty Laila was following this conversation closely, her eyes narrowing unpleasantly, though she still managed to continue her conversation with Aunty Runty at the same time.

  My father nodded. ‘I must have heard my parents say a thousand times “we came here to be Pakistani, not to be Sindhi”. I won’t deny there was an attitude of entitlement. I won’t even deny there’s still an attitude of cultural superiority, and I’m not defending that in any way. But, Asif, even if we put aside the political marginalization—I know you’ll scoff at the term, so let’s not go into that for the moment—this quota system is wreaking such havoc on the Muhajirs who have the education and the ambition...’

  I thought of the car thief. Hundreds of thousands like him in Karachi.

  ‘...and couple that with the police brutality, Asif, and you’re driving people to the point when they’ll pick up guns and detonate bombs.’ He took a breath. ‘I’m not denying that the rural parts of this province have their grievances...’

  Aunty Laila put down the phone and turned to Aba. ‘Aren’t you? You really pretend to have an objective view of things, Zafar; but scratch the surface and that’s one hundred per cent Muhajir blood that pours out, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a pretty violent image,’ Ami said. ‘Friends don’t scratch friends, Laila. And just in case you’ve forgotten, I’m not one hundred per cent anything. There’s a good dose of illiterate Pathan blood zipping around my veins.’

  Aunty Laila squeezed Ami’s shoulder. ‘You’re right, darling. I’m sorry.’ She twirled towards the two men. ‘Stop bickering and say something charming to me. Zafar, don’t you think my hair colour is fetching? See, when I stand in the sunlight, it has an aubergine tint. Not eggplant or brinjal or baing’n. Aubergine, with that sexy “zh” sound in the last syllable.’

  ‘Zzhhhhh,’ Aba purred at her, and she threw him the burlesque of a kiss. In my relief, I stirred an extra spoon of sugar into my tea without really noticing what I was doing.

  Uncle Asif poked me in the ribs. ‘What do you think of all this, Raheen?’

  ‘I think her hair looks great.’

  ‘No, silly. What do you think about things in Karachi?’

  I stirred my tea. No way was I going to get them started again. ‘I think there’s nothing I can do about the situation, Uncle Asif, so why waste brain cells thinking about it?’

  ‘Raheen!’ My father was staring at me, a look of shock on his face. My mother shook her head and leaned forward to say something, but before she could, Uncle Asif spoke.

  ‘Oh, come on, Zaf. She’s only twenty-one. Think back to your twenties. How concerned were you with——’ He stopped, turned red, and looked down. My father bit his lip and looked at me. What?

  The phone rang again, and we all turned to look at it gratefully, except for Ami, who was looking between Aba and me and shaking her head. But the call was for her—a mutual friend of hers and Aunty Laila’s was phoning to say someone from the newspaper office had been calling around, trying to get hold of my mother.

  ‘Odd,’ Ami said. ‘It’s only midweek.’ Ami worked on the paper’s weekend magazine, and we were accustomed to her colleagues trying to track her down when last-minute crises occurred. The most notable of these calls happened a couple of years ago when the magazine was running a piece on some musical evening Aunty Runty was organizing as part of a cultural festival, and an assistant at the office received a message from Runty at the nth hour, saying it was imperative that the article mention she would not tolerate ‘monkey business with toothpicks at the musical evening, so ne’er-do-wellers beware’. The assistant, terrified by this ominous statement, tracked down my mother, who advised him to ignore the call and proceeded to scatter toothpicks into Runty’s letter box on her way to dinner that evening. Runty didn’t speak to her for weeks after that, and still hadn’t explained the connection between monkey business and toothpicks.

  Ami dialled her office number and said, ‘What’s the toothpick?... Sonia Lohawalla? Yes, that’s right, she’s Raheen’s best friend...in the main paper?...Can’t you tell me what it is, I’m not home...oh, wait, there’s a fax machine here too.’

  When did the front door open without my hearing it? When exactly did the footsteps progress down the hall, and stop, as he realised my parents were inside and paused to decide: what next?

  I didn’t hear him, none of us did, because all our attention was focused on the drama within the room as Aunty Laila tore the paper out of the fax machine and handed it to my mother, unable to resist glancing at it first. She made a sound of disgust. ‘Tacky, so tacky. She’s best out of it if this is the kind of people they are.’

  It was a paid ann
ouncement that was to appear in the next morning’s paper. Ami read it out loud. The Rana family wishes to announce that the engagement between Adel Rana and Sonia, daughter of Ehsan Lohawalla, will not take place. The Ranas hereby apologise to all those whose good counsel they did not heed earlier in this matter, and request that the Lohawalla family, and those associated with them, make no attempt to contact Adel Rana or anyone connected to him.

  Ami shook her head. ‘Oh, that poor girl. That poor, poor girl.’

  Aunty Laila nodded agreement. ‘No good family will want their son to marry her now—not after both the drug charges and this slap in the face.’

  With an explosion of invective, Aba crumpled up the fax and flung it against the wall. The strength of his reaction shocked me out of my own fist-clenched fury. He was fond of Sonia, certainly, but this was entirely out of character. He saw me staring at him, and his eyes panicked. ‘How dare he,’ he said, as though he need to explain himself. ‘How dare he think he was even good enough for that darling girl? If I ever see him I’ll——Karim?’

  Everyone’s head turned towards the doorway, at which my father was staring in a mixture of disbelief and joy. I heard Ami get to her feet with a whispered, ‘Oh, there he is. At last!’ but as soon as I saw Karim’s face I knew something horrible was going to happen, because nothing was moving in the unblinking, unsmiling mask that had settled on his face like a second skin.

  ‘If you ever see him you’ll what, Zafar?’ He didn’t just cut the appellation ‘Uncle’ from his form of address; he cut every tie to his past relationship with my father.

  I caught Uncle Asif by the sleeve and whispered, ‘Please do something. Get him out of here.’

  ‘Karim.’ My father held open his arms, though it should have been so obvious that Karim was not in an embracing mood.

  ‘Is that what you’ll do when you see Adel Rana, Zaf?’

  I saw Ami flinch at the way he spat out that last syllable. But was that anxiety or a glimmer of excitement in Aunty Laila’s eyes?

  ‘Is it, Zaf? Will you, Zaf, when you see him, Zaf, hold your arms open, Zaf, and say, “Welcome, brother, welcome to the club”? The break-a-heart-too-good-for-you-you-cowardly-bastard club.’

  ‘Karim.’ Ami started walking towards him, he held his hand up.

  ‘I don’t want anything to do with you either, I’m sorry, Aunty Yasmin. Please stay away.’

  Something in my life was about to be destroyed. I could feel it. ‘Karimazov, go away.’

  He turned to me. ‘Are you going to stand by him, and call that loyalty?’

  ‘Karim, can we go somewhere and talk?’ My father took a step towards Karim, his arms still spread wide, though now it was in the manner of a man holding his arms away from his body to prove he’s not about to reach for concealed weapons.

  ‘We’ll talk here!’ Karim roared. He caught my father by the shoulder and pushed him down in a chair.

  In sheer terror, I caught him by his ear lobe and yanked at it. He spun around, cursing. I watched my hand form into a fist and fly at his jaw. He sidestepped, and my fist smashed into a glass ornament on the shelf behind him. Explosion of glass. I turn my face away. Karim turns his face away. Scrunch shut my eyes. Impact against my cheekbone. Not glass. The tinkle of shards falling to the ground. I open my eyes and there is Karim’s hand moving away from my face. Karim’s hand, which slapped me.

  Face stinging, hand miraculously unharmed, I stepped away from him. ‘You bastard,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t slap you.’ It was Aba. He took his shoes off his feet and handed them to me, as I stood barefoot amid the broken glass. ‘He didn’t slap you. He was shielding your eyes from glass splinters. He just moved a little too fast. Panic. But it was instinctive. He shielded your eyes before his own.’ He ran his fingers through his hair, glanced at Ami, and then looked back at Karim. ‘She doesn’t know, Karim. Raheen doesn’t know.’

  Steel hooks latched on to the weightlessness of the air when he said that. A stillness infected everyone, even me, though I didn’t understand the remark. Looking around, I saw I was the only one who didn’t understand it. Uncle Asif and Aunty Laila were standing together, holding hands like little children. Ami just looked at my father and in the sadness of her expression I heard her voice echoing from years away. Zafar, sometimes I think I love you more than I should. And Karim had recoiled, his eyes moving all around the room, settling momentarily on every face except mine, his voice, staccato, saying ‘but if’ and ‘that time’ and ‘how’ and ‘so why did’ and, finally, as he turned to look at me, ‘Oh God, what have I done?’

  ‘I did this, not you,’ Aba said. ‘Raheen, look at me. It’s time you heard the truth.’

  I closed my eyes and, half-turning, leaned against the wall. The white paint was cool against my cheek and tongue. All my life I’d visited this house and never thought to taste the walls. What an odd and misleading thing familiarity is; so ready to disguise itself as intimacy.

  ‘It was soon after the war ended,’ Aba began. ‘My neighbours, in those days, were the Mumtazes. A lovely couple, and their sons Bilal and Shafiq. Shafiq and I had been at school together. Bilal was a year younger. He was in East Pakistan, Bilal was, when the war broke out. His parents had been telling him for a long time to come home and he’d said he would but he kept delaying his return. Rumour was there was a girl there.’ Aba’s voice was strange, a monotone. I reached out to touch his sleeve, but something in Karim’s glance made me drop my hand.

  Aba continued speaking, without even noticing. ‘Shafiq was alone at home when the telegram came. Pink. The telegrams were pink. He’d been stirring his tea, still had a spoon in his hand, and it dropped tea on to one corner of the telegram.’ It was as though he was talking about a movie he had once seen.

  ‘He looked across the street and saw my house. I wasn’t directly opposite him, but close. Close enough that Bilal could hobble over to visit in the days when he had an injured ankle. He was always injuring himself playing some sport or other, and his ankle was so prone to fractures and swellings we were all convinced he’d end up permanently on crutches by the time he was middle-aged. Weren’t we, Laila?’ He’d been inspecting a piece of glass all this while, but he finally looked up and smiled at Aunty Laila.

  ‘Zafar, don’t,’ she said.

  I looked at Ami. She put a hand on my shoulder and gripped tight. I moved away from the contagion of fear in her fingertips, stepping closer to Karim as I did so.

  ‘Middle age seemed very far away in those days.’ Aba held the piece of glass between thumb and forefinger, his fingertip applying enough pressure to cause his skin to dimple but not to bleed. ‘I saw Shafiq run up the driveway, something silver glinting in his hand, and then he was banging on the front door, so hard I thought he’d break it. I opened the door and he just started screaming, “Those bastards, those bastards, those Mukti Bahini bastards! They’ve won the war, let them have the country, let them have it. I never cared. Not the way everyone else did.”

  ‘I asked him what had happened. I’d seen the pink telegram, I’d half guessed already, but I couldn’t accept it was true. He said, “You, I used to listen to you, and sometimes you made sense. I never said it, I’m no fool, but sometimes I listened to you. Those bastards, those bastards!” And still I couldn’t, I couldn’t believe it. I asked him again what had happened and he said——’ There was blood now on his fingertip, but his voice was still that monotone, though speeded up, and now I felt as though I was the one watching a movie.

  ‘Shafiq said, “My brother. My brother and all those other West Pakistanis stranded on the other side. The day we surrendered. Not even recognizable, his body. Not even recognizable, you bastard! My baby brother. What the hell do you have to say about your precious freedom fighters now?”’

  For the first time I really wondered what it had been like for Aba to be engaged to a Bengali during those days. I knew he’d opposed the West Pakistani action prior to and through the war; I had never h
eard much about 1971, but I’d heard enough to allow me to know where his sympathies lay. It must have cost him a great deal, but even then, even when he was little older than I now was, he would not back down on his convictions for the sake of expediency. My father. His bravery, more than Shafiq’s loss or Bilal’s death, brought tears to my eyes.

  ‘I still couldn’t quite believe it. What do you say to someone at a time like that? I said, “Shafiq. I’m so... Not Bilal, oh God, not Bilal.” And his face twisted into such rage as he answered, “You say ‘not Bilal’ but I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, it’s payback time. You’re thinking, our soldiers did as much and worse. You’re thinking, maybe Bilal did too. Isn’t that it? You’re thinking my brother did all those things people say the soldiers did.” Really, I was thinking I would never again hear him turn every tale of an accident into some grand joke; I was thinking, even Bilal couldn’t make any part of this seem anything less than horrific. And Shafiq said, “Don’t even think of coming to the funeral, do you hear me? Don’t even think of it.” And then he rose up on his toes in fury and said, “How can you do it? How?” I asked him, what? do what? and he replied, “You’re going to marry one of them. You’re going to let her have your children. How?”’

  The same way Aba had known the truth when he saw the pink telegram in Shafiq’s hand yet had been unable to accept it, I knew, right then, the tenor of what was to come and I turned to leave, to run away, but Karim gripped me fast, thumb and forefinger squeezing my wrist bones, his childhood gesture of intimacy towards me transformed into a grim vice. I looked up at him. Tears mingled with the blood from a glass-cut, just centimetres from his eye.

  ‘I heard Shafiq tell his version of what happened, months later,’ Aba continued, his tone still unvarying. ‘I was standing outside your living room, Laila, the day of your anniversary party. The one you thought we never came to. We were there. Both Yasmin and I were. About to enter, when I heard Shafiq. Yasmin wanted to walk right in and tell him to be quiet or say whatever he had to say to my face, but I said no, we’ll stand here, and you listen to what he has to say.’