by Bina Shah
Ali never asked his father about his first wife. His mother once told him that the lady had died in childbirth along with her baby daughter, Ali’s father’s first child. He’d often searched his father’s face for any trace of that tragedy marked in the lines around his nose and eyes. Sikandar’s face was always inscrutable, the skin of his cheeks and forehead like seasoned, polished wood, but he’d never really opened his heart to any of them, the tragedy of his life showing not in his face, but in his actions. Ali guessed he’d married a second time because people around him urged him to marry and have children, and unlike a woman, a man could start a family at any age. He was already in his mid-forties, a distant, unreachable time in a man’s life, when he became a father for the first time.
Ali’s mother was an educated woman: she’d completed her matric degree and even done two years of college privately. Her family was too conservative to allow her to go to school so she studied at home and just went to her college to sit the intermediate exams, which she passed with above-average marks. She was interested in studying science; she might have even had dreams of going to university in Hyderabad and becoming a dentist, dreams that would never come true because her family would never let her have a career, let alone go to a medical college where boys and girls studied together. It would have shamed the family.
When she was eighteen, Ali’s father’s father came to her house—he was friends with her grandfather—and proposed on behalf of Ali’s father. The proposal was accepted, his mother and father got married, and she moved out of the family home in Hyderabad to the small house in Karachi, and there they were today, his progeny, walking around on this earth like open wounds, hoping for someone to love them long after that someone had left them, first in spirit, then in body.
How many other houses in their sedate neighborhood, with its old houses built in the seventies, its overgrown trees lining the zigzag streets that flooded during every monsoon season, were like theirs: genteel on the outside, wasting away from neglect on the inside? How many other families lived like fractured glass, cracked but still holding up within the constraints of their frames?
The fear of losing Sunita through neglect, of becoming the same cold man that his father had been, pushed Ali in the opposite direction. He trusted the love between them, relied on it to keep him steady, keep him true. If I ever have to get married to a woman I don’t know and don’t love, Ali thought, I will die. Ali never wanted reenact the way his father had so carelessly squandered the love of his own wife and children. Nor did he want to come to Sunita because of lust, the way his father had approached the bootlegger’s daughter. He had to be with her in honesty and honor, in order to be the opposite of what his father was.
He was convinced that the gap between them, the issue of their opposite faiths, was of no consequence: Muslims and Hindus had coexisted in Sindh for centuries; they even worshipped together at the Sufi shrines in the interior. All these issues could be worked out in time; the important thing was to believe in each other above all else.
Sunita had no idea how passionately Ali felt about it, and he hid it from her, worried it would scare her off if she knew how much he needed her, how deep his craving for her really was. It took shape in his incessant dreams of possessing her body, but in truth he wanted to eat and swallow her very being, the soul of her the only antidote to the emptiness he felt in himself.
So when she brought up how she feared her dark skin would dissuade her suitors, he did not tell her automatically that she never need worry because he would marry her even if she were as dark as tar. Instead, he drained the last sip from his cup and said, “I’ll be really angry with you if you try to make your skin any lighter. None of that Fair and Lovely crap for you. Understand?”
He said it in a light, sarcastic way, while stroking her shoulder with his pale fingers, as if to reassure her that he would never let her go; but he couldn’t help feel slightly excited by the look of fear in her eyes whenever he spoke that way to her. He knew Sunita had a complex about her dark skin; and her unspoken gratitude toward Ali for having chosen her above a whiter, paler girl—a Muslim girl—filled him with a power that he hated himself for feeling. Ali needed to keep her close to him, even while pushing her away—a delicate dance that lovers had been performing for centuries, one whose steps he was learning as he went along. He had learned, from his parents’ marriage, that ambivalence was the opposite of indifference. And that love came with fear, because when you didn’t fear the loss of your beloved, it meant you didn’t really love them at all.
To Ali’s surprise, Sunita agreed to come to the beach party, when he asked her the next day after Jehangir’s pool night. They were taking a class break under the shade of a banyan tree in the university garden, sharing a packet of chili chips. “I’d love to!” Sunita said, when he told her about the invitation. “It’s perfect weather, too. It’ll be cool.”
“Cool,” Ali agreed. But nothing had been cool since October 18. Two weeks later Haroon was still missing, presumed dead, and Ali was having nightmares about the bombing that he didn’t want to remember. Now he had two ghosts following him everywhere: Haroon and Sikandar. Maybe going to the beach would be a good break, a nice change. Maybe when Ali gazed upon the ocean, the calm blue water, and felt Sunita’s hand in his, away from all the eyes that judged them, and the mouths that would condemn for being together, things would feel normal once again.
The day couldn’t be any more alluring, a lazy, long Saturday that stretched out before Ali and Sunita like a gift that would take all day to unwrap. They were at Masood’s beach house on French Beach, prettier and better constructed than most houses Ali had seen in Karachi: electricity and a generator, a flat-screen TV, and a huge glass-paneled lounge that made you feel like you were in a ship because you could only see the sea when you looked out of the windows. Servants were cooking barbecue on a grill in a pit outside—fresh fish, crabs, prawns—and Masood was plying the guests with all the liquor they could want. Sunita didn’t drink, but Ali took an ice-cold beer and strolled outside to view the scene on the beach.
Masood was right: there were plenty of foreigners, which surprised Ali. You’d think they’d have all gone into hiding, given how bad things were in the city, but there were at least six or seven of them, men and women, the men clad in shorts and tropical shirts, the women in bathing suits. One of them, a Scottish woman in her thirties, the wife of the head of some multinational corporation, was even wearing a bikini, and although nobody was going topless, the sight of her in that daring outfit cheered Ali up a little. He felt sorry for them, could see they felt safe being here, far away from the city and its problems, protected by Masood’s contingent of armed guards, who kept a respectful distance from the beach hut, ferocious with their Kalashnikovs clutched under their arms.
Besides the foreigners, there was a gathering of local guests: Jehangir was there, Ahmed, Omer, Zulfi, and some of the girls that Masood knew: Leela, Zainab, Mishi. The guys were sprawled on the stairs that led down to the sea, the girls hiding from the sun except for Leela, who sunned herself boldly along with the goris, turning her palms up to tan along the insides of her arms.
French Beach was the best of Karachi’s beaches; far better than Clifton Beach, where the sweaty hordes, as Jehangir called them, came to frolic on the weekends. Clifton Beach was purely for lower-class families, men in shalwar kameezes, women in burqas, six or seven children to each family arriving in Suzukis and vans and on the backs of motorcycles. They splashed in the water fully clothed, they ate freshly grilled corn and drank juice from roadside stalls, they ran around on the beach and flew kites; and nobody of any social standing or class ever went there, except for some of the residents of the Seaview apartments, who liked to take morning walks before the riffraff showed up.
Sandspit, the next beach up, lay beyond the city, flat and boring like its name, and then came Hawkesbay, rockier and more desolate. The waves catapulted stro
ngly against the rocks and there was a dangerous undercurrent in the summers; the best time to bathe there fell in the winter months, when the tides were calm and there were no jellyfish in the water. The entire coast of Sindh had been spared from the tsunami of 2004, the beaches left intact. Ali didn’t like to imagine what would have happened to the fishermen who lived all along the coast in tiny villages. He was glad God had saved them from that kind of disaster.
And then there was the Rolls-Royce of Karachi beaches: French Beach, so named because in the seventies all the French people who were working in the city owned weekend huts here, leasing the land from the villagers on terms more favorable to the French than to the locals. And not just the French: Americans, Germans, Dutch, British people flocked here to windsurf, barbecue, tan, and drink, and you could hardly see a Pakistani anywhere on the beach. In those days the foreigners lived in Karachi without fear, their children went to international and local schools, and everyone loved having them around, hosting them at dinner parties and picnics.
These days the children weren’t allowed to live in Karachi anymore; the few goray left moved around the city in cars with armed guards and blackened windows, scurrying from their heavily guarded homes to their work and back again.
It was not just the distance from the city that drew people to French Beach: it was strikingly beautiful, a natural cove enclosed in the hug of two rocky arms that extended out into the sea. You could climb the rocks and find crabs and small fish in the pools left there at low tide. The water sang deep blue, and beachgoers even snorkeled around the shallow reefs and windsurfed in the bay.
Sunita and Ali decided to go for a walk onto the rocks, away from the party. They rarely got to be together so openly in Karachi. As soon as they were clear of the huts, Ali took Sunita’s hand and helped her to clamber up onto the craggy hill. They turned around and surveyed the stretch of golden sand, the huts that followed the gentle curve of beach, and far in the distance, the city buildings shimmering like mirages in the haze. Here there was no sound but the endless drone of waves breaking on the shore, the wind that soughed in harmony with the water.
They made their way carefully to the edge of the outcrop, and sat with their legs dangling over the side. The tide was gentle at this time in November; it sprayed a little water and foam onto their shins and covered their cheeks in a fine mist. The sun, too, warmed them rather than baking and broiling them as it did for most of the year.
Ali put his arm around Sunita and she leaned into him, and since there was nobody else around, he started to kiss her. She responded eagerly. Warm and accommodating, her mouth opened under his lips. Their tongues met, and they were both thrilled by the intimacy they were sharing under the open sky. Ali could feel her pressing close, wanting more; he would have loved nothing better than to push her back on the rocks and lie on top of her, take her right here, hiding their bodies in a rocky pool where nobody could see them. But he couldn’t. As much as he loved her, she was not his to have as yet. Not like those two girls Jehangir found—while trying to decide for sure if he was gay. They’d claimed to be students at Karachi University but they must have come from Napier Mole Road; Jehangir went off with the taller one and Ali had the shorter one for an hour in that little apartment in Seaview that belonged to a friend of a friend of a friend. Sunita was different, and Ali owed her more than that, in return for all the love she’d given him.
The kiss ended and Sunita drew back with a little sigh. Ali leaned his head on her shoulder and she put her arm around him, stroking his wrist with her slender fingers. “Any news?”
Ali tightened his lips in an unseen grimace and pressed his eyes against her neck. “None yet.”
“It’s terrible!” she whispered.
“Two weeks. Can you imagine? Two weeks and not a word.”
“The police?”
“They haven’t been able to find anything. There were a lot of people missing,” Ali said. One hundred and thirty-five dead, one hundred injured, at least thirty or forty people disappeared into thin air—no bodies found. Haroon was one of the missing. His father and brother came all the way from Hyderabad, turning up at the office one day last week to beg the station owner, Kazim Mazhar, to use his influence and help them find their missing son.
They talked to Ali, too, and he explained to them that he didn’t remember much about that night, that after the first explosion Haroon was all right, but after the second one he disappeared and Ali didn’t know what happened to him. They nodded at Ali, their liquid black eyes full of hurt and confusion. They were only simple men from Hyderabad, already scarred by the ethnic riots that they’d had to endure in the nineties. Haroon’s father told Ali that he’d encouraged his son to move to Karachi, that he’d been thrilled when Haroon had been offered the job with the news channel. “I thought it would be a good change for him,” he told Ali, in Sindhi. “I thought he’d be away from all the trouble in Hyderabad. Hyderabad is going nowhere and I wanted my son to go somewhere.”
Ali clasped his hand and murmured polite words of commiseration, his heart aching for Haroon and for his brother, who looked as if he could be Haroon’s twin. There were Sindhis who were die-hard PPP supporters, who would lay down their lives for Benazir and her father, but Haroon’s family just wanted their son to get a good start, to make something of himself. They’d wanted to stay away from politics, live peaceful lives, earn a little honest bread. And now politics had robbed them of their precious son, and his family could not bury him because his body was nowhere to be found.
Benazir had appeared on television in the days after the bombing, talking about how it was a deliberate plot on the part of the government. She’d had no proper security, she claimed; the lights had been switched off just before the explosions and the government had refused to give them the electronic jammers that would stop any bombs from detonating near her cavalcade.
Ali didn’t want to be anywhere near her image; he couldn’t stand to hear her voice. It made him feel as though ants were crawling underneath his skin. But he couldn’t avoid it; her face was everywhere, on the television, in the newspapers, on the posters that came up all over the city like mushrooms after a monsoon. Her voice, strident and demanding, boomed out from speakers everywhere, in people’s cars, in restaurants, and most of all at the news station, where the programmers broadcast repeatedly the clips that they’d compiled from Ali’s reports filed earlier in the day, before the explosion.
“Is it true?” Haris had asked Ali, as he sat on the couch with their mother and sister, watching the scene of the bombing repeated over and over again on all the channels. “Did they switch off the lights before the bomb went off?”
“Stop that, Haris!” exclaimed Ali’s mother. “Don’t you think he’s been through enough already?” She’d nearly fainted when she’d seen the bombs on television. Ali called her on his mobile to tell her that he was fine, and she wept down the phone, uttering prayers for his safety and offering thanks that he was unharmed.
Ali didn’t feel unharmed as he stood shaking in the chaos, people running around him, the ambulance sirens wailing, the smell of explosives and blood settled around him. The streetlights were flickering on and off. Broken glass from cars and nearby shops sparkled everywhere on the ground, and people who’d lost their shoes in the explosion were cutting themselves as they stumbled around, screaming out loud in pain and terror. Ali’s heart was throbbing in his chest as though a strong fist were squeezing it unevenly, and for a minute he wondered if he was going to have a heart attack from fright.
He found Ram and they walked for a mile, away from the crush, holding hands. A doctor glanced at them as he ran by; they were covered in soot and grime but no blood, so he decided that they didn’t need his help, even though Ali wanted to reach out and clutch at him as if he were a plank of wood and Ali a drowning man in the middle of a swirling river. Ali and Ram walked and walked, not saying a word, just wanting to put di
stance between them and the terrible thing they had just seen. They didn’t talk about Haroon, they didn’t know what to do, because he had vanished and there was no way they could find him in the darkness and the confusion. In those moments they were as lost as he was; the only difference was that they would come back eventually and he never would.
“So did they, Adda?”
“Did they what?”
“Turn off the lights?”
Ali wanted to reach around and slap Haris. Instead, he frowned and reached for the remote, switching off the television, ignoring the shocked looks of his mother and sister, the open-mouthed idiocy of Haris’s face. “I don’t know what she’s talking about. They didn’t turn off any lights. She’s a bloody liar.”
And now Benazir had gone to Dubai for a few days to see her mother, who they said was dying of Alzheimer’s. It was only an hour and a half by plane; she could go and come in a day if she wanted to. Everyone was saying that she’d been frightened by the attempt on her life, that she wouldn’t return. The president and his cronies were overjoyed with what they thought was their victory over her, contradicting all their statements that they’d had nothing to do with the bombings. They’d warned her not to come, they said. Something like this was bound to happen.
“And how would they know that unless they’d planned it themselves?” Sunita said to Ali, echoing what everyone was saying in the streets, in offices everywhere, in drawing rooms all over the country.
But Ali was tired of talking about it, of thinking about it. It was like being lectured nonstop by his father. He glanced back at the beach hut, thinking that they should probably get back, that people would wonder where they were and would think the worst, naturally. “We should get back—” He stopped in mid-sentence.
“What is it, Ali?” Sunita followed his line of vision, then gasped and took hold of his arm.
