Kartography

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘I’m just sitting here, trying to drink my cup of tea and read my magazine in peace. I don’t require polite conversation from the likes of you.’

  Zafar’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you to forgive me what I said.’

  Yasmin squinted up at him, standing between her and the Club pool in the bright sunlight. ‘Oh, please! I hardly for a second think you meant it. The unforgivable thing was your refusal to go running after her when she ran out of your house.’

  He continued to stand in front of her, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot.

  ‘Oh, sit down, Zaf. I can’t see you properly against that sun.’

  He sat down. They looked at each other, nothing to say.

  ‘Can you see me properly now?’

  ‘Yes. But you’re not much to look at.’

  His mouth curved into a smile. ‘Liar.’

  She poked him in the ribs, and he laughed and grabbed her hand. Ali’s hand on hers had never had such an effect on her spine: warmth and chills radiated from it at the same time. She closed her eyes.

  Maheen, I’m sorry.

  ‘There’s no call for apology, Zaf. I’m thrilled for both of you.’ What else can I say?

  ‘But what about you, Ali?’

  ‘Oh, someone else will come along.’ Yasmin. Yasmin. The sound of my heartbeat.

  ‘Have you seen Maheen lately?’

  ‘This is not a waltz, Zafar. We can’t just swap partners.’

  ‘All this partner swapping. It’s like a square dance.’ Maheen pointed to the book she’d been reading when Ali walked into her garden and found her sitting there. ‘I can hardly keep them all straight. Let’s see... Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander loves Hermia, but Demetrius also loves Hermia though he used to love Helena, who still loves him and so hates Hermia because Demetrius loves Hermia, not her. I mean Helena. Or do I mean Hermia?’

  Ali opened his own copy of the same play. ‘Do you? No, you’ve got it right. Let me try the next series of steps. Strike up the band, enter Puck. He pours love-juice on Lysander’s eyes and Lysander finds he loves Helena and hates Hermia...’

  ‘And so it goes, on and on, the quartet’s affections changing every few minutes...’

  ‘...Until miraculously, at the end, everyone is paired off—and they all live happily for the next ten minutes, after which the play ends and no one knows anything further.’

  Maheen leaned back in her chair, laughing. ‘So the reason you told me to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream and meet you for tea is...?’

  Ali raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t. You dropped a note off at my place with those very instructions.’

  ‘Oh. Well, something here is strange.’ She handed him a typewritten note with his name signed at the bottom. ‘So you didn’t write this?’

  Ali laughed. ‘We’ll call whoever wrote it “Puck”.’ He straightened his tie and remembered the night he had chiselled her initial into a tree. Whatever had brought that out, surely it could be revived again. Not to that extent, perhaps, not enough to make him pick up hammer and chisel, but some echo of it. He watched her run her fingers along her eyebrows, smoothing down the hairs in that familiar gesture of hers which signified uncertainty, and he thought perhaps he heard an echo.

  ‘How about it, Maheen? Are you in the mood for a wedding?’

  ‘Invitation? For me?’ Yasmin ran her fingers along the embossed surface of the card. ‘I half-thought I wouldn’t be invited. Zafar neither.’

  ‘I half-thought you wouldn’t either, Puck.’ He smiled at her and she didn’t pretend to be confused. ‘But Maheen was in a gentle mood after she heard about Laila, so I took the opportunity to add to our invitation list.’

  ‘I just heard about the miscarriage. Awful, it’s so awful. Poor Laila.’

  ‘She nearly died, you know. Loss of blood. But Dolly was at the hospital, visiting a relative, and she heard there was no blood matching Laila’s type, so she called her husband and God knows what strings Anwar pulled but he managed to get hold of a match.’

  ‘God bless Anwar. And we’re always so snide about his newly-found connections.’ Strange how already it seems a dream or a part I once played, all those months I was engaged to you with no thought of wanting anything differently for the rest of my life.

  ‘Hmmm. There was some half-deranged guy at the hospital who almost attacked the doctors. Seemed to think those last available units of blood were earmarked for his brother, who died without them.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Yes. Apparently the police were called to get rid of him. He was led off screaming about how one day he’ll be rich and powerful and his house will have running water, twenty-four hours a day, gushing out of gold taps.’ Stay where you are. Don’t move any closer. Don’t let me smell that scent of jasmine and spice on your hands. At this distance, I can make myself believe you’re only an old friend.

  ‘I am so glad I’m not poor. Particularly not in Pakistan.’

  ‘I’m so glad I don’t know anyone with gold taps.’

  ‘Silver tea set? What do you think, Zafar? As a wedding present for Ali and Maheen.’

  Zafar, when we send out wedding invitations, can we say: no silver, please. Show some originality.

  Or we couldjust elope, Maheen. How about it? Today?

  ‘Silver’s fine, Yasmin.’

  Yasmin raised her eyebrows at him across the Ampi’s table. ‘That was a joke. You know Maheen hates silver.’

  ‘Oh.’ He swirled ice cream around in its pewter bowl.

  She had to say it. For all their sakes. ‘Zafar, it’s still not too late for you and Maheen.’

  He found he didn’t even have to pause an instant before taking Yasmin’s hand and saying, ‘Yes, it is.’ Guilt had swallowed up everything else between him and Maheen, and for a while he had thought that regret would swallow him up too. But Yasmin had changed that. He suspected people thought him fickle, and if everyone wasn’t so frantically busy trying to put the war and everything associated with it behind them he doubted his engagement to Yasmin would have met with such approval all around.

  And Maheen was with Ali. Fine and upstanding Ali.

  He didn’t think very hard about Maheen and Ali together. He couldn’t. Not yet.

  His other hand closed around Yasmin’s.

  But soon.

  ‘So soon? I thought you’d refuse to see me for at least another decade.’ Yasmin drew Maheen into an embrace. ‘Oh God, I’ve missed you more than a little.’

  ‘Silly girl, as if you thought I could stay angry for ever. I’ve been picking up the phone to call you every day since Karim was born and twice a day since Raheen was. Did you really imagine I’d turn you away at my doorstep? Ali, what are you doing?’

  ‘I’m smelling Yasmin’s hands.’

  ‘Is it a pleasant smell?’ Yasmin smiled at him.

  ‘Talcum powder.’ Now I know, we’ll all be all right. We’ll all be friends for ever. The echo stronger now than it was the day we got married, and surely it can only amplify as the years wear on.

  ‘Now all you have to do is convince that husband of yours that all is forgiven,’ Maheen said. ‘What does he want from me, Yasmin, an official letter of pardon?’ Zafar, when we talked of names for the children we were going to have, neither Karim nor Raheen were on the list. I miss you. I miss the way you made me laugh. Come back, in whatever form it is. I’d rather have you as my friend than watch you sulking in corners ashamed to meet my eye each time we meet.

  God, Zaf why didn’t you try even once to say you were sorry?

  . . .

  One more month, and the reprieve would be over. I lay down on the bed and looked out through the huge window at the lushness of early summer. Odd to think these paths that I’d walked, that glen in which I’d spotted deer, that student diner where I’d braved the most arctic of nights for a plate of curly fries, would soon only be memory.

  ‘Out into the real world,’ my classmates and I would
chirp, when thinking of graduation and what lay beyond. To them the real world meant work, bills, the start of a road leading to a mortgage, children, a suburban house and a car in the driveway. But what my real world was, I still hadn’t decided.

  ‘You should stay,’ Zia had said to me on the phone the night before, calling from New York, where he’d gone to talk to real-estate agents. ‘You’re entitled to a year of practical training with your student visa. You should definitely stay. This isn’t about your father any more, Raheen; the way things are in Karachi, you’d be a fool to go home.’

  It would be so easy to stay, and convince myself that it wasn’t about my father any more. I hadn’t seen him since that day on the pier. While I was still talking to Ami in the gallery, Aunty Laila had walked back in, and I told her I wanted Uncle Asif to get me on the next flight back to New York. My old school friend Cyrus was there, and I knew he’d put me up until the start of the semester without asking any questions. ‘I just need to go away and clear my head,’ I told Ami, expecting her to argue me out of it, but she had replied, ‘As long as you promise to clear it rather than empty it.’ I didn’t tell her the main attraction of staying with Cyrus was that he could be counted on to envelop me in a whirlwind of activity that made it possible to live from one hour to the next without any thought of what lay beyond, or behind.

  There had been a flight that evening. My only qualm was leaving Sonia, but when I called her she said her father was taking the family on Umra. I doubted any desire for religious pilgrimage lay behind her father’s decision; he probably just wanted her out of Karachi so that she wouldn’t have to face the scandal of the broken engagement.

  There was a gentle tapping on my door. I ignored it. Probably Zia, back from New York, stopping off to see me on his way to his college. I wanted to lie here and wallow in nostalgia about my college days, not discuss the future and what I honestly thought lay in it for me if I went home. The tapping turned into a loud knocking.

  ‘Oh, go away,’ I said.

  There was the sound of footsteps retreating from my door. I rolled my eyes. Sometimes he gave up so easily. Truth was, one of the things I already regretted most about graduation was that it meant moving out of a place where Zia was less than twenty minutes away by car; it meant Zia would no longer be within my local calling zone with his peculiar nocturnal hours that allowed me to wake from nightmare at four in the morning and call him without hesitation. I walked towards the door. The phone rang.

  ‘Hello,’ I said into the receiver.

  ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea.’

  ‘Zia? Who just knocked on my door?’

  ‘Tooth fairy. Listen, I have an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t go.’

  I covered my eyes with my hand and fell back on my bed. ‘Zia, not this conversation.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. Move to New York with me.’

  ‘What do you mean “with me”?’

  ‘You know. I mean, no strings or anything. Well, not too many of them. But what the hell, you know. Why not? One day at a time.’

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not. ‘Why ruin a beautiful friendship, Zee?’

  ‘Come on, Rasputin. Come on. Save me from myself.’

  ‘Zia, I can’t.’

  ‘It’s Karim, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited for him to remind me that in four months Karim had made no attempt to get in touch with me, and to remind me further that Sonia had still not received any halfway decent proposals and didn’t I see how selfish I was being? But instead he said, ‘Abracadabra, baby. Guess there’s a part of me that still believes in magic.’

  ‘Thanks, sweetheart.’ I hung up, and opened the door, hoping to find some clue to the identity of the person who had knocked.

  ‘Ra!’

  At first I thought I must have imagined it. The voice came from behind me, it came from inside my room.

  ‘Open the window, I’m about to fall.’

  I swivelled around. One foot on my window ledge, one foot on a tree, head tilted back to prevent the glasses balanced on the edge of his nose from falling off, he was Charlie Chaplin rather than the Romeo I’d imagined when I’d imagined him appearing outside my window.

  ‘Karim, what are you doing?’ I levered open the window, and fumbled with the clips that kept the screen in place.

  ‘Attempting the splits, fifteen feet above ground. Could you remove that screen?’

  ‘No, it’s stuck. You’ll have to go down and use the front door.’

  ‘I don’t think you appreciate my problem.’ A gust of wind blew and Karim yelped, removed his foot from the ledge and wrapped himself around the tree limb. ‘I can’t get down.’

  I put a heavy hiking boot on to my right foot, stood on my bed and kicked the screen. My foot went through the wire mesh.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I thought I’d kick the whole screen off.’

  ‘Yeah, and then you’d have fallen out yourself.’

  I looked at Karim, clutching on to the tree, head still tilted back, and then looked at myself, one foot in a large boot sticking out of the screen. ‘One day we’ll tell our children about this moment,’ I said.

  ‘Is that “our” as in your children and my children, or “our” as in our children?’

  The wire mesh had left cuts all around my ankle, but I really didn’t care. ‘Is that a proposal or a proposition?’

  ‘I’ll take what I can get.’

  Karim looked at me, looked at the ground, looked at the branches beneath him, leapt clear of the limbs and leaves, his arms spread wide, embracing the wind. He jumped up, not down. Lifted himself up, Daedalus for a moment, long enough for me to extend my arm through the jagged screen and feel the air that brushed his fingertips brush my fingertips also; then he was rolling on the grass, the gradient of that patch of lawn carrying him away from the concrete dorm and towards the gravel path.

  By the time I made it outside, he was standing up, apparently unharmed. I took his face in my hands. ‘I can’t believe you’re here.’

  ‘Could you bear not to go back to Karachi?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let’s walk.’

  Walk? Who wanted to walk?

  We walked. There should have been many questions in my mind, but I was suddenly so happy that all I could think of was something I’d wanted to ask him since he’d yawned and stretched and his shirt had lifted to reveal his stomach in Mehmoodabad.

  ‘Does that chicken-pox scar on your stomach mark an erogenous zone? Tamara says her boyfriend’s chicken-pox scar does.’

  ‘Every part of me is an erogenous zone when you’re around,’ he said, as though remarking on the time of day. ‘Now, behave yourself.’ I was raising his T-shirt, and he caught my hand and smacked it lightly. ‘I’m here on serious matters.’ I felt myself grow tense, and he said, ‘Because I’ve seriously discovered that I seriously don’t want to believe that everything between us is over.’

  Was this because things were too convoluted to reason out, so he just clutched on to that instinctive need we’d always had for each other? I was afraid to ask.

  ‘Karim...’ I said, and then didn’t have the words to continue.

  He kissed me.

  When we finally pulled apart I allowed myself a moment to believe everything had been resolved, but he had his serious face firmly in place as he took my hands in his, and sat me down on a bench at the edge of the glen. ‘I can’t go back to Karachi. It’s starting again. The same kind of stuff that went on in ’71.’ He ran the tip of a leaf down my face. ‘The desperation, the craziness. The stench from the newspapers. This is how it begins.’

  I pulled away. ‘Karim, you’re being silly.’

  ‘Why do you even want to go back, Ra?’

  Did I want to go back? Back to a city without glens, without places to sit in public with my arms round his neck, without the luxury of wandering among indistinguishable
trees unmindful of the repercussions of getting lost. Back to a city that was feasting on its own blood, the violence so crazy now that all the earlier violence felt like mere pinpricks. Back to a city that bred monsters. Back to a city where I’d have to face my father. Why should I want to go back to any of that?

  And yet. When I read the Dawn on-line and then looked around me to the pristine surroundings of campus life, I knew that every other city in the world only showed me its surface, but when I looked at Karachi I saw the blood running through and out of its veins; I knew that there were so many reasons to fail to love it, to cease to love it, to be unable to love it, that it made love a fierce and unfathomable thing. ‘Because, Karim, you’ve shown me that it’s not so simple to leave a city behind.’

  ‘You have to see why I can’t go back.’

  I nodded. I saw that, for all his obsessing about the city, or perhaps because of his obsessing, Karachi was an abstraction to him, in the way the past is an abstraction, and he lacked the heart to make it a reality. And I saw that everything he had heard about 1971 gave him reason to fear that national politics would again force people he loved to reveal their narrow-mindedness and cowardice and rage, and those people might include Zafar’s daughter, so like her father in so many ways.

  ‘You were the one who said I needed to stop living in tiny circles.’

  ‘I’ve found that doesn’t matter to me as much as I thought. Or maybe it’s just that you mean more to me than I knew.’

  I stood up, twigs and dry leaves crunching beneath my feet. If Zia had walked through the opening in the trees, I think I might have said yes to New York City and made it all simple.

  ‘What about Soma?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘She’s the loveliest girl in the world. And to marry her because I think no one else will come along for her is such a supreme act of condescension. She said that to me on the phone just the other day.’ He smiled. ‘Except she called it an act of condemnescension.’