Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Ali, yaar, Ali, mate, there you are.’ Aunty Runty’s husband slapped Uncle Ali on the back. ‘Hear you’re thinking of khisko-ing from the country, packing up in Paki-land.’

Beside me, Karim went very still.

Uncle Ali shrugged. ‘Just a thought, Bunty. Nothing decided.’

‘Oh, what’s to think about? The place is going to hell. Might as well get out. And when you do, I’m buying your house. Don’t even think of showing it to someone else, OK, mate?’

‘Outside,’ Karim said. We slipped past the guests to the garden and hoisted ourselves on to the boundary wall. I was content to sit on the wall, cross-legged, looking out at the pye-dogs padding across the quiet side street, but Karim stood up so that he could look down to the sea. It was too dark for him to see all the way to Clifton Beach, but he liked to believe he could discern tremors in the distant darkness, signifying waves.

‘He’s not really serious, Karimazov. He’ll never leave Karachi. It’s just talk. I mean, what would he do without my parents around? What would they do? Your parents without my parents is like…it’s like…me and Zia and Sonia without you.’ What I’d really meant was ‘It’s like me without you’ but somehow it came out differently.

‘I’ve already started thinking of Karachi as a place that I have to say goodbye to; every day I say goodbye to some part of it and then two days later I see that part again and I feel so relieved but also not, because then I have to say goodbye to it again. This must be what dying is like.’

That boy could really spoil the mood of an evening.

To change the subject I said, ‘Aunty Runty says Aba didn’t marry your mother because she’s Bengali.’

Karim sat down. ‘Well, it was 1971.’

‘So?’

‘The year of the Civil War. East Pakistan became Bangladesh.’

‘Thanks for the history lesson. What are you trying to say about my father?’

Karim shrugged. ‘Nothing. But of course people must have assumed that the ethnic thing was a factor.’

He’s a muhajir.

He’s not Bengali, he’s not.

I wrapped my arms tight against my chest. ‘Do you believe that?’

Karim pulled a leaf off a guava tree and bit off its tip. ‘No.’

‘Why are you eating a leaf?’

‘I’m saying goodbye to it.’

He handed me the leaf. I looked down at the severed veins and ran my finger along Karim’s tooth marks. ‘It’s easy to leave a leaf, Cream. How do you eat your roots?’

He put his arm around me as he hadn’t done since we were very young and not yet self-conscious about his boyarm and my girlshoulder. Spine to spine and foot to foot was fine, but this embrace we’d both cut out of our lives as soon as we were old enough to get embarrassed by the silliness of our peers and our elders who said: ‘Oh, boyfriend girlfriend! Early starters, haina?’

He put his arm around me. That was all. He put his arm around me and we didn’t say a word.

‘Do you really think your father will decide you should move to London?’

It was break time, a few weeks into the start of the school term, and Sonia, Zia and Karim were sitting in our favourite spot, on the cement ground by the flagpole in the front yard, eating chilli chips. I had wandered off for a few minutes to find out from my house captain how soon netball practice would start — typically the netball season was in December, but because of the trouble in the city at the end of the previous year our entire sports calendar had been thrown into disarray. (‘And they say the elite aren’t affected by what’s happening in the city,’ I’d quipped to Karim a few weeks earlier when I found out Softball had been cancelled altogether and my pitching arm would have to languish in mothballs until the following year; because he knew I was just trying to get his hackles up he calmly slid a piece of ice down the back of my shirt and paid my comment no further attention.) When I returned to join Sonia and the two boys, I found they’d somehow strayed on to that unmentionable matter of Uncle Ali’s immigration plans.

‘Of course he won’t.’ I answered Sonia before Karim could say anything. At that moment I believed it. The world was a joyful place that break-time because, minutes earlier, Zia had taken my dupatta off my shoulder where it hung like a limp rag and tied it on the sleeve of his blue blazer as an arm-band. Two evenings earlier we’d watched some awful adaptation of the Arthurian legends on TV — surely as he (with an air of absent-mindedness) knotted the dupatta above his elbow he must have thought of a knight wearing his true love’s handkerchief into battle as a sign of her favour.

‘Let’s not even think about it,’ Karim said, looking past us to the bowler charging down the concrete pitch of the playing field, his Imranesque run-up undisturbed by a football shooting past him from one of the competing games on the field. ‘Things are better now than they were a few weeks ago, right? Maybe it’ll keep getting better.’

Zia and I nodded, but Sonia shook her head. ‘We don’t know half the things that go on. My father won’t let my mother go and visit all our relatives in other parts of town. He says there’s too much they’ll expect us to do, there’s too little we can do or say without flaunting.’ None of us knew what to say to that, and we all looked at one another uncomfortably, until Sonia relieved the moment of its awkwardness by speaking again. ‘But if you do. Move to London, I mean.’

‘Yes?’ Karim prompted her.

‘Well, it’s just that, if you meet the Queen.’

‘The Queen?’ I said.

‘Yes, the Queen. Will you ask her something for me?’

‘Sonia.’ Karim laid a hand on her arm. ‘I’m not going to meet the Queen.’

‘How do you know? Last year my neighbour was there. In London. Just walking in Hyde Park, taking a short cut from somewhere to somewhere else and she met Amitabh Bachhan. And’—triumphantly—‘he’s not even English.’

‘What!’ Zia stood up and yelled, loudly enough to make a cat leap out of the bushes around the flagpole and scamper across the yard into the shade of the stone colonial building that housed our school: ‘Amitabh Bachhan isn’t English!’

The principal, who was English, as English as only an Englishman in Pakistan can be, walked past with a baleful look in Zia’s direction. Zia saluted him and sat down.

‘Ok, so, Sonia, what do you want me ask the Queen?’

‘I just want to know if she got really depressed when they aged her on the coins.’

Zia, Karim and I laughed, and if Zia looked at Sonia in a way that neither Karim nor I looked at Sonia, I was simply too happy or too oblivious to notice it. Secret passions lurked in the breast of my boy Zia, but I was stupid enough to mistake the dupatta on his sleeve for his heart.

To sum up our little love triangle: I had a crush on Zia and Zia had a crush on Sonia and Sonia worried about hell. Hell is being a teenager worrying about hell, but Sonia exercised a steely grip on anything resembling a hormone and choked the life out of it. Once, soon after we had become friends, I tried convincing her to let her imagination run wild with some guy, any guy — there had to be someone out there — and she just smiled that wicked smile of hers that undercut her every dutiful utterance and said, ‘When you know you’re going to have an arranged marriage, you start preparing early on. I’m a lot happier than you, have you noticed?’

‘So what do you think about to make yourself happy while I’m sitting here getting so blue I’m purple over Zia?’

‘Heaven.’ And then she looked so pious I knew she was joking.

Sonia was, we used to say, ‘from a conservative family’. Or, at least, that’s how Karim used to put it, though Zia was more apt to say, ‘They’re just not like us, yaar, though Sonia’s got potential.’ Conservative or not-like-us, put it however you want. The fact was, Sonia couldn’t go to parties if boys were going to be there; she couldn’t sit alone in a car with a boy for even a second, which is why Zia would always pick me up before picking her up even though that made no logistical sense; she couldn’t speak to boys on the telephone unless the door was open and her parents could hear everything. There were plenty of girls at school with me who had much the same restrictions, but Sonia’s family was the most ‘not like us’ of all because none of our parents knew her parents, none of our cousins were married to her cousins, none of our uncles had done business with her uncles. So naturally everyone concluded that it was shady, very shady, dealings that had enabled her father to move his family to the poshest part of town, enrol his daughter in the most elite school in the nation, and install those gold taps in his bathroom.