Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

Yasmin stepped back and blew her nose vigorously on the piece of cloth Ali proffered. ‘No one will ever marry me,’ she declared.

Ali looked out towards the garden. He could hear Maheen’s laughter, though she was somewhere just out of sight. ‘I was thinking the very thing.’

Without warning, Yasmin’s hand stung across his cheekbone.

Ali put a hand to his cheek, and smiled. ‘I meant, I was thinking it about myself.’

‘Oh,’ said Yasmin, mortified. ‘Oh.’ The pause that followed seemed to require her to say something further, so she said, ‘I’d marry you.’

And somehow, as they stood and looked at each other, Zafar and Maheen’s laughter floating up from an unseen part of the garden below, they knew they’d re-tell this mad, fumbled, impossible, tear-filled, bruised, cold, miraculous non-proposal scene to their children and grandchildren, and the most absurd part of the story would be how easily it might never have happened.

Karachi’s air was heavy. I could feel it press down on me as I alighted on to the platform, and I had to open my mouth and imagine there was a Hoover in my lungs in order to inhale the amount of oxygen that had flowed through my nasal passages with one swift sniff in the rural atmosphere of Rahim Yar Khan. So the way we breathe is habit, I thought, and paused to wonder what was not habit. What, in my life, would I never forget, never unlearn, never attempt to do without?

‘Home,’ Karim said, jumping out of the compartment doorway with no regard for the steps.

When we were children, Karim always disregarded steps, or disregarded as many of them as he could. He leapt through the world, and not always cleanly. There were twisted ankles, bruised knees and, once, exposed bone, but none of these deterred him from throwing himself at the wind. When I try to understand how memories happen, Karim’s leaps confound me. By which I mean, I cannot remember faces as they used to be before becoming what they were when I last saw them. When, for instance, I remember Sonia at thirteen I do not see a long-haired girl whose body is just beginning to curve into breathtaking beauty. I do not see her at all. But I sense her, I know — I remember — what it is like to be thirteen and angular and standing beside her. When I try harder for a visual image, old photographs come to mind. Sonia leaning on my shoulder as I lean against the orange shutters of the tuck shop; Sonia’s face a scream as Zia holds up a lizard to her face; Sonia and Karim playing tug-of-war with her dupatta. But I cannot move those images forward even one second in time. How Sonia looked when the shutters opened without warning and we both tumbled back; how she looked when she realized the lizard was plastic; how she looked when the dupatta tore. I remember these things happening, I know they happened, but I cannot bring her face, or any of our faces, into focus as I recall the moment. So I want to say, visual memories overwrite themselves. The part of my brain that stores memories of Sonia keeps updating her face so that I can recall it clearly only as it was when we last met. And yet, I know exactly how Karim looked when wheeling through the air. I know how he looked doing it at seven, at ten, at fourteen.

And, yes, I know how he looked jumping on to the platform at thirteen. Not beautiful, though the notion of a leaping boy is beautiful. Some growth that still hadn’t earned the right to be called a moustache had started to occupy the place between his nose and lip; his face and stomach still clung on to the previous year’s puppy fat but his limbs were beginning to go gangly; his ears…at any age, Karim’s ears were unfortunate. Don’t get the idea that Karim stood out by virtue of his awkward looks; most of the boys I was in class with were going through a similar phase at the time.

Except Zia, you might expect me to say.

I keep forgetting how crazy I was about him then. I forget that, and I remember other things which surely can’t be real memories. For instance, the drive home from the train station. I seem to think I remember Karim looking out of the window as we snaked through the congested parts of Karachi with its colourful buses maniacally racing one another, men selling fruit and vegetables from wooden carts on the side of the road, deformed beggars dextrously making their way through traffic, laundry flapping from washing lines on the latticed balconies of low-rise apartment buildings. But I can’t really remember that, can I, because even if Karim had already started imagining what it would be like to be a stranger in Karachi, even if he were jumping ahead of his own life and seeing the city with the eyes of someone who views Karachi as contrast rather than norm, I had no inkling of it at all. And so I would not have paid any attention to buses or beggars or balconies, and I would not have paid any attention to Karim paying attention to them. I would, I’m quite sure, have been thinking of Zia instead.

He was waiting for us at my house, when Uncle Ali’s driver dropped me off. Something wobbly happened to my knees when I saw his car parked outside. He was waiting at my house, not Karim’s. He was waiting for me.

‘Oh yes, I forgot to tell you. Zia’s whisking the two of you off for breakfast. I told him we’d stop at your house first, Raheen, on our way back from the train station. I’ll call your parents at work and tell them we’ve arrived safely. But promise you won’t go too far away. Things have got better, but they’re not OK yet.’

Karim and Zia greeted each other with whoops of delight and high-fives while I struggled to pull my suitcase out of the trunk of the car. Uncle Ali rolled down his car window and yelled at the boys and they both came running to give me a hand. Zia smelled of Drakkar Noir. He hoisted my suitcase up on to his head and held it there with one hand while swaying up the driveway as though he were a village woman bearing an earthenware matka full of water. He was so absorbed in being entertaining he had quite forgotten to say hello, let alone that it was good to see me. Uncle Ali gave me a look that seemed almost sympathetic, and then his car drove off.

‘Zia, I’ll take that inside. I need to use the Louvre in any case.’ Karim took the suitcase and disappeared indoors, and I was left alone with Zia.

‘Hi, Raheen. Suno, if you want to take a shower or something before we go for halva puri, no problem. Karim and I can hang about for a few minutes.’

I looked down at my crumpled shirt and the caked farm mud that clung to the hem of my jeans.

Zia laughed. ‘No, I don’t mean you look as though you need to. You look fine. Really good, in fact. Your parents are at work, aren’t they?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, a voice in my head shouting ohmygodohmygodohmygod. ‘Why?’

He pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket of his denim jacket. ‘Don’t want them to see me smoking.’

I watched him unwrap the cellophane sheath, flip the packet open with his thumb and turn one cigarette upside down in the pack, for good luck. He took a box of matches out of his pocket, attempted to strike the flint against his shoe, and then realized he was wearing sneakers. He grinned, embarrassed. ‘Good thing you’re the only one around to see that. Which do you think is cooler? A box of matches or a lighter? I mean, obviously if the lighter is a Zippo, that wins. But if your choice is those transparent, brightly coloured lighters or a box of matches with a Ferrari pictured on the box, then which?’

‘Vole,’ I said. ‘Damn vole.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Karim, our friend’s gone mad,’ Zia shouted over my shoulder. ‘She’s talking about voles.’

‘Get in the car and drive, Zia.’ Karim came up to me and brought his fist down on my shoulder. ‘Vole, huh? I thought you’d say “I rush cats”.’