Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

‘No, idiot,’ I said to Sonia, ducking my head so that I wouldn’t have to look at Karim. ‘We didn’t go back for the cat.’

‘Where did it happen exactly? I’ll tell my father to drive me there. Poor cat could still be limping around.’

‘Your father’s car is red, Sonia.’

Karim turned around at that, and tried to smile. Come on, Karimazov.

‘You think we should just forget the cat?’ Sonia’s voice was uncertain.

‘Put it out of your mind like last term’s vocabulary list.’ Yes, like that, smile. ‘Which of our parents called you?’

Sonia laughed. ‘All three sets. Ama got quite upset. Wanted to know if I minded that the three of you had gone on some joyride without inviting me round. Not that I’d have got permission on a school night.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I know you just wanted to be alone with Zia, but you should be careful. You could get a bad reputation.’

‘Sonia, please. I’ll see you in school, OK? ‘Bye.’

I hung up, relieved that Karim was looking like himself again. And sounding like himself, too, as he walked around the kitchen pulling out teacups and spoons, and muttering: ‘Is green tea popular in Greenland? When cannibals in Greenland tell their children to eat their greens are they referring to vegetable or meat? What do you call a cannibal who decides to become vegetarian?’

But when we returned upstairs, the atmosphere there hadn’t improved at all.

‘Things really are going to hell here,’ Uncle Ali said, adding eleven grains of sugar to his green tea. ‘How long can we just go on taking it? Don’t you ever think of getting out, Zafar?’

Aba waved his hand dismissively. ‘I can’t imagine growing old anywhere but here.’

‘Exactly,’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘I mean, London is fine, but I’ll never get used to umbrellas, not to mention the way they talk.’

‘The parrot-all parasol. Those talking umbrellas,’ Karim whispered to me, but he was trying too hard.

‘Really, those accents over there!’ Aunty Maheen went on. ‘Last time we were there, we had just stepped out of Heathrow and this man came up to us with a cigarette in his hand and said, “Cu ah geh a lye fro you, plaiz,” so I thought, “Oh, foreigner. Airport, after all,” but no, he was a local and he was asking if he could get a light from me, please. I thought, Henry Higgins, where are you now? But my point is, if we leave here I’ll spend my whole time missing people in Karachi because there are so, so, many to miss that you can’t just squeeze in all that missing during your morning cup of tea.’

‘If one of those bullets had been aimed just a few inches higher…’

‘Oh, shut up, Ali,’ Ami said so sharply that I knew she’d been thinking the same thing. ‘I hate it when you do this sort of thing. Just drink your tea and think calming thoughts. Think of dry-cleaning.’

Karim and I had got up and walked out by now, and Uncle Ali and Aunty Maheen must have seen us close the door and assumed we’d walked immediately away, away and out of hearing, but we hadn’t because the string of my garnet necklace broke and Karim and I went down on hands and knees outside the TV room to pick up the fallen stones.

‘Not this time, Yasmin,’ Uncle Ali replied. ‘Look, I know you don’t want to think about it, but you’ve got to. This little incident has made up my mind, I’ll tell you that. We’re migrating.’ At Aunty Maheen’s noise of disbelief, he added, ‘At least, I am. And I’m taking Karim with me.’

Karim’s hand closed around a handful of garnets. My hand closed around Karim’s wrist.

Aunty Maheen said, ‘Ali, when did you become this person?’

‘Stop it now, both of you,’ Ami said.

But they didn’t. ‘I’ve become my reflection, dear wife. I’ve become the man I’ve seen reflected in your eyes for so long.’

‘Ali, don’t,’ Aba pleaded. ‘It’s been a tense evening; best not to speak. We’ll only say things we regret.’

‘Regret is an emotion,’ Aunty Maheen said. ‘It doesn’t apply to him.’

I tried pulling Karim away, but he shook me off. ‘Karimazov, come on. Let’s go to my room. You don’t want to hear this.’

While I was speaking I drowned out whatever it was that my father said, but after Karim pushed me away again, the heel of his palm shoving my shoulder, we both heard Aunty Maheen’s response. ‘Please, Zafar. Don’t you, of all people, try to tell me that feelings can’t change. How dare you be the one to say that to me.’

Sometimes you hear the voices of people whose every cadence you think you know by heart. By heart. But then sounds emerge from their throats, sounds that you want to believe cannot belong to them, but it’s worse than that because you know that they do; you hear the sound and you know that this grating cacophony belongs to them as much as does the music in their voices when they call you by nicknames that should sound utterly silly but instead are transformed by affection into something to cherish. I heard Aunty Maheen turn on my father, and I knew that one day, not today perhaps, not even next year, but one day people more familiar to me than the smell of sea air would become strangers and I would become a stranger to them.

‘The kids are still outside,’ Ami said, and Karim and I turned and ran into my room.

‘Now we’ll listen to music and say nothing.’ Karim headed straight for my stereo without waiting for a response. He popped in one of my parents’ tapes and pressed play and the room filled with the morose sounds of ‘Seasons in the Sun’. Karim switched off the music and pulled a jigsaw puzzle out of my desk drawer. ‘Let’s assemble.’

He was so much his father’s son, though I’d never seen that before (and maybe I didn’t even see it quite then, but play along, play along). Both of them sought desperately for the imposition of order in their lives, though how anyone as adept at anagrams as Karim could fail to see the arbitrariness of order I’ll never understand. I finally was ready to say, ‘Let’s talk, Karim,’ but he was already placing all the border pieces into one pile and sorting the rest into piles of co-ordinating colour.

‘You’re putting the sky in the sea,’ I said. ‘And I think that branch is really an antler.’

He sat back and tapped his ankle bone, visible between jeans and sneakers. ‘Where does that road go?’ he asked.

I looked at the cover of the jigsaw box. ‘What road? You mean this path?’

‘No, the main road that cuts past the Sheikh’s palace. Near where you were shot at. Khayaban-e-Shaheen. Where does it go? Does it keep going on to the sea?’

‘Who knows?’

We heard his parents’ voices rise up in anger from the study. I tapped Karim’s clenched fist and when he didn’t respond I prised open his fingers. He could become a hermit, I thought. I could see him alone on a mountain, spending hours observing his fingers’ ability to flex and unflex, and tracing the bones that connected thumb to ankle in the jigsaw of his body. I shook my head. Karim on a mountain? He was such a city boy.

He looked up, suddenly concerned. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Me?’

‘You were shot at.’

‘Oh, yes.’ I let go of his hand and sat back. Already that memory was fading, and I had started anticipating the social cachet I could enjoy in the school yard from having a story like tonight’s under my belt. ‘It’s over,’ I said.

He looked at me and shook his head. ‘But the world is slightly different now, isn’t it?’

They cannot protect you from this. And what else?

‘Not as safe.’ Inexplicably, I started crying. I drew my knees up against my chest, and looked down at the carpet. Tears landed on my jeans and sank into the fabric.