Kamila Shamsie - Kartography

But there was nothing reassuring about Karim. We were only inches apart, both swaying cross-legged on the suitcases in the back, but he was too busy looking at streets to pay attention to me. Looking at streets, and whispering street names when we drove past road signs, and drawing a map of the route we were taking from his house to the airport, his pen veering off course every time Aba braked or went over a speed bump or drove through a puddle.

At the airport, he handed me the map, our fingers barely touching. Then he swivelled round and threw his arms around my father and burst into tears. There was so much hugging goodbye between our parents, and between his parents and me, and my parents and him, that I pretended, even to myself, that it hadn’t really registered that the brush of fingers had been Karim’s and my goodbye.

On the drive home, I said, ‘Who’ll speak in anagrams with me now?’

‘Poor Karim is the one who’s left everyone. You’ll still have Sonia.’ My mother winked at me. ‘And Zia.’

Yes, I’d still have Sonia. And Zia. And so many other things that Karim no longer had. I’d still have the Arabian Sea and Sindhri mangoes, and crabbing with Captain Saleem, who had the most popular boat of all because his business card promised ‘Guaranteed no cockroach’, and, yes, there’d still be those bottles of creamy, flavoured milk from Rahat Milk Corner and drives to the airport for coffee and warm sand at the beach and Thai soup at Yuan Tung; yes, Burns Road nihari; yes, student biryani; oh, yes, yes, yes, all that, and all that again. So why complain? Why contemplate words like ‘longing’?

After all, it was just the ends of my sentences I was losing.

That night as I cried myself to sleep I knew that, somewhere in the sky, Karim was doing the same; and some of my tears were his tears, and some of his tears were mine.

The rain had stopped. Water drops shimmered in the gossamer interstices of a spider’s web outside my window. Not so much captured in the web as resting on it. I could, I thought, lift up that web, very carefully, and place it against my throat, where it would adhere, threads retreating into near invisibility and only rain drops remaining to glisten against my skin like some precious inheritance.

Jake’s hand reached across me to close the window. ‘It’s freezing,’ he said. ‘I’ve been asking you for the last ten seconds to get rid of the draught.’

‘Didn’t hear you.’ I swivelled my legs off the window ledge, making room for him to sit next to me, but he remained standing on my bed, head inches away from touching the ceiling.

‘Of course you didn’t. It’s always Grand Central Station in here.’ He jerked his head at all the people, seven or eight of them, crowded into my tiny dorm room.

When the downpour had started, less than an hour earlier, I had been attempting to read a supermarket romance for my ‘Myths of Courtship’ class, but the sudden ferocity of the rain made me set aside my herbal tea and rush outdoors. It was the closest thing to the monsoons I had encountered in the three years I’d been at university in America, rain ricocheting off the ground with the speed of bullets from a Kalashnikov. I half-expected to see little frogs and winged insects appear. People were running for shelter, the ones who knew me shouting as they charged past that I was crazy, ‘Get inside, Raheen.’ I looked down. Crazy I could handle, but crazy in a white shirt was probably not such a good idea. I pulled the clinging material away from my body, hearing with satisfaction the suction release of wet cotton from flesh, and ran up the stairs towards central heating.

‘Study break. Ten minutes. My room. Who’s going to make the hot chocolate?’ I yelled down the hallway on my way into the shower.

Someone shouted, ‘But I’ve just started War and Peace,’ and someone else: ‘We’ve been back from the dining hall less than half an hour.’

‘Raheen says study break, ten minutes,’ another of my hallmates declared. ‘You want to argue with her?’

Less than fifteen minutes later, I had a crowd of people clustered in my room as, freshly showered and dressed in sweats and fleece jumper, I poured out hot chocolate with marshmallow bits from a large saucepan into mugs and plastic glasses bearing the university’s crest. Tamara from next door held up my romance novel with a whoop of delight, and the rest of my friends chanted, ‘Read, Raheen, read,’ over and over until, with mock resignation, I took the book from Tamara, sat on the window ledge by my bed, cleared my throat and started reading out loud choice passages in breathy, emotive style.

She stared boldly into his piercing blue eyes, but he was not a man to be daunted by feminine fire and he stared right back, his gaze suggesting X-ray vision that could look right through her blouse and see the rapidly beating heart that lay beneath.

His jeans were so tight they could barely contain him, and she trembled with fear and ecstasy at the thought that he might burst out of them at any moment.

She tossed her head, and wished she could do the same with her emotions.

‘Will you just come?’ He impatiently pushed the door open and gestured her through.

‘Make me,’ she replied, saucily.

He had always been a man to rise to a challenge.

When I finally stopped reading, even Jake, who had come into the crowded room halfway through and was slouching in the door frame, was shaking his head in amusement, though the evening before I’d walked out on him in the dining hall while he was in the middle of yet another rant about how little time the two of us spent together, alone. I had told him he just didn’t understand Pakistani attitudes towards friendship, and he’d sneered. That was, I had to admit to myself, entirely an appropriate reaction. I put the romance novel down. Between the body heat, central heating, cocoa and fleece I was beginning to feel a little hot. I turned to look outside, wondered exactly when it had stopped raining, and opened the window.

That smell in the air. The aftermath of rain. I let the book fall from my hands. Tawdry. Cheap and tawdry. I could hear Jake’s voice, but I didn’t want to have to deal with him, so I continued looking outside at the autumn leaves, vibrant reds and oranges, scattered across paths, plastered on to buildings. A breeze blew up and I came so close to telling everyone in the room to be quiet, just be quiet, so that I could hear the sound of leaves being blown about. Russet rustle. Almost the sound of waves breaking on pebbled sand.

In Karachi, I would never have been able to hold court for as long as I had just done. Hold court or play the jester, whatever it was that I had been doing. One or more of my friends would have sat down beside me, leaned an elbow on my shoulder, scanned ahead of where I was reading to some further point on the page and taken the book from my hands to read aloud the next absurd lines in exaggerated tones, at once competing and collaborating with me. I leaned my head against the window screen. Rain had tinged the mesh with the smell of rust. Not true, not true, that in Karachi I felt my world was perfect, although sometimes I deluded myself into thinking that when I was far from home. But even in Karachi I’d feel this need to turn away from people whose company, just seconds earlier, I had delighted in. Sonia sometimes told me off for my ‘mood swings’, in Sonia’s way of telling people off, which was not to rebuke or reprimand but merely to ask what was wrong. Once, not so long ago, I had finally said, ‘Even when I’m with everyone whom I could possibly want to be with, I feel like something’s absent,’ and Sonia, showing no signs of being hurt by this remark, nodded, and asked, ‘Absent or lost?’