Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘Good thinking.’ Zia smiled, and for the first time since the gun shots I remembered I was in love with him.

He started the car again and as we headed towards my house Karim told us why Zia had been treated like a criminal for having a bullet-marked car. There had been a series of burglaries in Phase V, where we all lived, in the preceding weeks, and the police had been unable to apprehend the perpetrators. (The Saleem Yousuf lookalike told Karim this in a mixture of Urdu and Punjabi but he said ‘perpetrators’ in English, pronouncing it as two words: perpa traitors.) Earlier that evening the dacoits had struck again, but this time their getaway car was spotted. The car was red. So the police alerted all the armed guards who were employed to protect the wealthiest houses in the neighbourhood.

‘What exactly does “alerted” mean?’ Karim asked the policeman.

The policeman smiled. ‘We said, if you see a red car, going fast, with two people in the front seat, shoot them. We advised shooting at the tyres, so that the car would stall, but, you know, some of these guards don’t have much skill at marksmanship. Also, they get quite bored, so any chance for excitement… Anyway, one of the guards told us he had shot a red car, near the Sheikh’s palace, which had two people in the front seat. That’s how we knew your cousin was lying to us about being alone. We couldn’t let him go until we knew the truth, just in case he was involved with the thefts. But, of course, if you say a girl was with him…that explains things.’

‘That’s absurd,’ Zia said, pulling up to my gate. ‘It’s a Mercedes. Since when do dacoits drive around in a Mercedes?’

When bullets have missed you by inches, you should assume you’ve expended your quota of good luck for the night. All the same, I was keeping my fingers crossed as we drove home, hoping my parents were still at the beach, or that they’d returned, exhausted, and gone to sleep without noticing my absence. But when Zia turned on to my street, there was no mistaking Aba standing on the boundary wall, binoculars trained on the Mercedes. Only when we pulled up in front of the gate, just inches away from him, did he lower the binoculars and call out in the direction of the house, ‘It’s them, Yasmin! Phone the others.’

‘I’ll take the blame,’ Zia whispered to me. ‘Get out and explain. Give whatever version you want.’

I was half-convinced he’d drive away instead, which is why I kept sitting in the car, forcing my father to lower himself from the wall and come over to us.

He walked around to Zia’s side, and didn’t lean down to look in, but stood straight, drumming his fingers on the roof of the car. Zia, Karim and I looked at one another, uncertain of how to proceed.

‘Well, he’s your father,’ Zia whispered finally.

‘You’re sitting closer to him,’ I replied.

In the end, I think it was the irritation of that drumming sound rather than any chivalric impulse that made Zia poke his head out of the window. ‘Sorry, Uncle. Got excited about having this car. Mercedes, Uncle Zafar. Could you have resisted going for a spin when you were young?’

‘Oh, very smooth, Zia,’ Karim muttered from the back seat.

Zia tried again. ‘Sorry, really. But back in one piece. If Raheen would just get out, I wouldn’t hold you up any longer. Altaf’s behind us, see? He can drop Karim home and I’ll drive back to my place and then we can all go to sleep, because it is late, I know, and we have school tomorrow and so if Raheen would just get out…’

Aba’s hand reached in, pulled the key out of the ignition and pointed towards the house. ‘Yes, sir, absolutely, Uncle. My parents aren’t still at the beach, are they?’

By this time my mother had come outside, and walked around to my side of the car. Karim groaned. I suddenly realized why Zia had wanted me to get out so that he could drive off. I continued looking straight ahead, so I didn’t see Ami’s expression as she realized what the bullet holes were, but I heard her gasp.

‘Where were you when this happened?’ she asked me, pointing to the bullet holes.

‘Right here,’ I replied, from the passenger seat.

The looks we place on our parents’ faces when we show them the jagged evidence that we are living in violent times, no escape from it. No mere fluke that it came our way, no, not a fluke but something closer to probability, something closer to the roll of a die. Those looks that we have never seen until that moment, but we know they’ve seen them in their imaginations, their dreams, in their mirrors that time last year when we were late coming home from school because there seemed no harm in loitering around the school yard and then there seemed no harm in stopping for sugar-cane juice halfway between departure point and destination. How do they forgive us every time, I wondered, as my father came round to my side of the car, his expression mirroring my mother’s before he even saw the bullet holes; how have they forgiven us already?

Aba leaned through the window to hug me, one hand smacking the back of my head while the other one gripped my shoulder. ‘My baby,’ he said. ‘My baby.’

‘I’m fine, it’s fine.’ For the first time in my life I felt I needed to be the adult, reassuring my father that the world was still in order. But how could the world be in order if I was that one doing the reassur ing? Crack a joke, Aba. Issue a command. Tell me nothing like this will happen again.

But he did none of these things, just held on to me, until Ami pulled him away and said, ‘It’s OK, darling.’ I don’t know which one of us she was speaking to, but it got my father to stand up straight and it got me to climb out of the car. When I explained what had happened Aba put one arm around me and another around Karim, reassuring rather than asking for reassurance this time, but Ami merely took Zia by the shoulder and said, ‘Do you realize how lucky you are that I’m too relieved to be really angry?’ I was completely mortified, of course, but Zia didn’t hold it against me, just said, ‘Yes, Aunty. Sorry, Aunty. Maybe I should call my parents.’

As we were walking towards the house, Ami put a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Why is it that the only thing you resemble me in is your wilfulness?’

I looked at Aba and then at Zia. ‘And your weakness for gorgeous men,’ I said.

She started to laugh, then forced a stern look on to her face. ‘You’re still in disgrace. Don’t think this matter is over,’ she said, in a voice that suggested terrible rules being prepared to curtail my freedom. I was hardly reassured when she put an arm around me and kissed me on the top of the head. My mother had been sufficiently wilful as a teenager to know exactly how wilful teenagers needed to be handled, and we both knew that a gentle word of admonishment would have as little effect on me as it would have had on her some twenty-five years ago. She left me to ponder the suffering I would have to endure and quickened her pace to catch up with Karim and whisper something that made him smile and look back at me.

Of course Karim wasn’t in disgrace at all, but he was hardly the kind of boy to sit around looking chipper while his two friends were awaiting punishment, so when his parents and Zia’s parents were called and all of us made to sit in the upstairs study to await their arrival, he didn’t gloat or look satisfied but bit his lip and looked as nervous as Zia and I did. It wasn’t long afterwards that we heard Aba open and close the front door, and then open and close it again. There was some conversation that was too soft for us to hear, and then Uncle Ali’s voice demanded, in a raised but unnaturally even tone, ‘For how long do we put up with this kind of thing?’ I remember thinking that unfair. We’d never driven off at night in a stolen car and got shot at before.